Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Larded Sweetbreads
Larded Sweetbreads
Partially boil the sweetbreads, then drain and leave them until cold. Lard the sweetbreads with strips of bacon and lemon peel, putting the bacon in the center and the peel down the sides. Lay them in a stewpan with brown gravy to a little more than half their height, and let them simmer gently for an hour. Arrange the sweetbreads on a hot dish, thicken the gravy with a little flour, season it to the taste with lemon juice and catsup, and pour it over the sweetbreads. They should be served while very hot.
Sweetbreads, Montebello Prepare some sweetbreads the same as sweetbreads Waldorf; take them from under the weight and trim them into ovals; cover them all with a preparation made of other sweetbreads minced into very small dice with mushrooms of the same size mingled with cream sauce, salt and pepper. Form this over the ovals in a domeshape and cover with chicken forcemeat, containing very finely shredded red beef tongue. Dress the ovals on a dish covered with Montebello sauce, made by mixing tomato and Bearnaise sauce together.
Sweetbreads, Parisian Style Wash four sweetbreads and boil them for twenty or twenty-five minutes, then drain and soak them in cold water. Lard two of the sweetbreads with bacon, and stud the other two with fillets of raw truffles, pointed at one end. Put some slices of onions, carrots and turnips in a stewpan with some thin rashers of bacon, put in the sweetbreads, season with a little salt, and pour in some good broth to about three-fourths their height. Place a sheet of buttered paper over the sweetbreads, and boil them gently till the liquor is reduced to one-third, then place the lid on the stewpan with some hot ashes on it and finish cooking them. Ornament a border mould with some truffles, fill it with veal forcemeat and poach it in the bain-marie. When cooked turn the border of forcemeat onto a hot dish, place a piece of fried bread in the center masked with forcemeat, and fill up the hollow with cooked sliced truffles and mushrooms. Brush the sweetbreads over with melted glaze, and stand them on the border resting them on the block of bread. Place three button-mushrooms and a truffle between each sweetbread, garnish an attelette skewer with a truffle and a cockscomb, and fix it in the top of the bread support; pour round the dish a small quantity of brown sauce that has been reduced in a little white wine, trimmings of mushrooms and truffles. Serve the sweetbread with a sauceboatful of the same sauce.
Three linked preparations from the Waldorf's larder, written for a brigade that had a larding needle, a stock pot and a truffle account. The bones of them still work; the assumptions do not.
- Buy and prepare the sweetbreads properlyVeal sweetbreads (thymus, and sometimes pancreas) are highly perishable and should be used within a day of purchase. Soak them in several changes of cold water for a few hours to draw out blood, then blanch, cool, and peel away the membrane before anything else — the recipe's "partially boil, drain, leave them until cold" is that step compressed.
- The missing recipe"Sweetbreads Montebello" begins by telling you to prepare them as for "sweetbreads Waldorf," presumably a recipe given elsewhere in the book. What this text does confirm is that they are blanched, trimmed and pressed under a weight until cold -- "take them from under the weight" -- which is what makes them firm enough to trim into neat ovals.
- Larding without a needleA larding needle draws strips of fat through the meat; if you have none, cut narrow channels with the point of a thin knife and push in the bacon and lemon peel with the back of a skewer. Keep the peel to thin strips of zest only — pith turns bitter over an hour of simmering.
- An hour is a long timeThe sweetbreads here have already been part-boiled before they reach the pan, and 20 to 30 minutes of gentle braising may well be enough; a full hour can leave them dry or cottony. Judge by feel -- they should be yielding but still hold their shape.
- "Hot ashes on the lid"Heat from above as well as below, the range-era way of finishing a braise gently. Cover with the buttered paper (a cartouche) and a lid and finish in a low-to-moderate oven until done; the recipe gives no temperature.
- Catsup meant something elseIn 1896 "catsup" in a hotel kitchen was as likely to be mushroom or walnut catsup as tomato — thin, dark, sharp with vinegar and spice, closer to Worcestershire than to the sweet tomato sauce now sold under the name. Use it sparingly and taste as you go.
- Glaze and garnish"Melted glaze" is glace de viande, brown stock reduced to a syrup — a spoonful of demi-glace stirred over heat does the job. Cockscombs are effectively unobtainable, attelette skewers are decorative only, and raw truffles can be replaced with sliced brown mushrooms without harming the braise, only the display.
- YieldFigure one sweetbread per person as a first course. Four sweetbreads, as in the Parisian version, serve four, with the forcemeat border and truffle garnish stretching it to six on a mixed menu.
Sweetbreads sat high in the American restaurant hierarchy in the 1890s: delicate, quick to spoil, tedious to clean, and therefore exactly the sort of thing a hotel kitchen could charge well for. Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel rather than its chef, and this book reads like a working index of what the kitchen could send out -- the same base ingredient dressed three ways, from a plain larded braise to the fully architectural Parisian version with its poached forcemeat border, fried-bread plinth and skewer of truffle and cockscomb. That last style of presentation is pure late-nineteenth-century grande cuisine, the tall, garnished releve that Escoffier's generation would spend the following decades stripping away. Names like Montebello were attached to garnishes and sauces freely in this period, often honoring an aristocratic title or a battle; the sauce here, tomato blended into Bearnaise, is simply a warm emulsion tinted and sharpened, and its name tells you more about kitchen fashion than about any particular Montebello.