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Lambs' Sweetbreads in Shells
Boil sixteen lambs' sweetbreads, using care not to overdo them; when cold cut them into dice, and mix with them one-third of their quantity of cooked mushrooms, keeping them covered. Pour a little bechamel sauce into a saucepan allow it to reduce, gradually mixing it with the cooking stock of the lambs' sweetbreads, so as to get half a brown sauce. When it thickens and coats the spoon, put the mushrooms and sweetbreads in with it and remove it from the fire at once. Secure some large table-shells, fill them with the mixture, smoothing it on the top, sprinkle grated breadcrumb over, pour one tablespoonful of warmed butter into each, and bake until browned in a quick oven. Arrange the shells on a fancy paper over a dish, and serve,
A shell-baked ragout of the sort that filled the first courses of hotel menus around 1900. Nearly everything hinges on not overcooking the sweetbreads, which Oscar flags twice in a single short paragraph.
- The hinge: gentle poachingLamb sweetbreads are small, and they firm up fast. Soak them in several changes of cold water until the water runs clear, peel away membrane, then poach at a bare simmer for about 10 minutes, no more. Boiled hard they shrink and go grainy, and no amount of sauce recovers them.
- SourcingLamb sweetbreads (the thymus, and sometimes the pancreas, of a young animal) are a special order from a butcher; veal sweetbreads are more widely sold and can stand in, substituted by weight rather than by count, since they are much the larger. Buy them very fresh and use them the same day.
- "Table-shells"Real scallop shells, sold as baking shells, or 4 oz ramekins. Butter them, and set them on a sheet pan so they do not tip.
- The sauceWhat Oscar describes is a béchamel let down with the sweetbread poaching liquid until it is midway between white and brown — in practice a thin velouté reduced to nappe consistency. Reduce it before the sweetbreads go in; once they are added, take the pan off the heat immediately.
- "A quick oven"A hot oven, usually taken today as somewhere around 400-450F. The filling is already hot, so this is only a browning step -- roughly 8 to 10 minutes, or a minute or two under the broiler.
- Breadcrumbs and butter"Grated breadcrumb" means fine dry crumbs from a stale loaf, not the coarse fresh kind. A tablespoon of melted butter per shell is generous by modern taste; two teaspoons browns just as well.
- Mushrooms"Cooked mushrooms" means mushrooms cooked before they are added, not raw; button mushrooms sweated in butter are the usual choice. Cook them separately and drain, or their liquid will thin the sauce.
- YieldSixteen lamb sweetbreads with a third their volume of mushrooms should fill roughly half a dozen to eight shells, so six to eight first courses. "Fancy paper" is a decorative paper doily laid on the serving platter, which also steadies the shells.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, gave his name to this 1896 volume, and was cooking for a clientele that expected organ meats as luxuries rather than economies: sweetbreads — the thymus, and in some cuts the pancreas, of a calf or lamb — were among the more expensive items on a New York menu, prized for their delicacy and their short shelf life. Serving them en coquille — bound in sauce, crumbed, and browned in a scallop shell — was a common hotel device of the period, used for oysters, crab, chicken and sweetbreads alike, because it turned a small quantity of costly material into an individual portion that arrived at the table looking deliberate. The shells were presumably washed and reused in the kitchen; the paper doily beneath them, mentioned almost in passing, belonged to the conventions of formal service. American appetite for sweetbreads faded over the twentieth century, which is why a dish that needed no explanation to Oscar's readers now requires a butcher's cooperation.