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Rissoles of Sweetbread
Wash and boil two sweetbreads for twenty or twenty-five minutes, drain and leave them until cold. Cut the sweetbreads into slices and then into small squares. Fry a chopped onion in a saucepan with a little butter, then put in one-fourth pound of ham and the same quantity of raw mushrooms, all cut into small pieces. Fry the above mixture until the moisture has evaporated, put in the pieces of sweetbread, season them with salt and pepper, then stir them over the fire for a minute or two. Pour in one-half teacupful of half reduced bechamel sauce, remove it from the fire and leave until cool. Roll one pound of puff paste out onto a floured board to a thin square, divide the sweetbread mixture into small equal quantities, put them on the paste a little apart from each other, dampen the paste with a paste brush dipped in water, fold the edges over the sweetbread mixture, pressing them down with the fingers, then cut the rissoles with a plain half-moon-shaped tin cutter. Arrange the rissoles on a baking tin, brush them over with beaten egg, sprinkle with crushed vermicelli and bake. When cooked pile the rissoles on a folded napkin spread over a plate, and serve.
Scalloped Sweetbreads, Richelieu Take four blanched sweetbreads, cut them into slices and stew them in a saucepan with one ounce of butter and one-half of a wineglassful of white wine. Season with one tablespoonful of salt, one teaspoonful of pepper and a small quantity of grated nutmeg. Cook for six minutes, moistening with one gill of thick white sauce, and add two sliced truffles and four sliced mushrooms. Fill six scallop shells with the preparation, sprinkle the tops over with breadcrumbs, pour over all a few drops of clarified butter and brown slightly in the oven for about five minutes. Serve on a dish with a folded napkin.
Stewed Sweetbreads, Catalane Cut into slices four blanched sweetbreads, put them in a sautepan with one-half gill of sweet oil, one tablespoonful of salt, one teaspoonful of pepper, two chopped shallots and half of a slice of green pepper. Cook to a golden color for about six minutes and add two peeled tomatoes cut into pieces, one gill of Spanish sauce and a crushed clove of garlic. Cook for ten minutes longer, arrange the sweetbreads on a hot dish, and serve without delay.
Three sweetbread preparations run together in the original text: pastry-wrapped rissoles, a gratin in shells, and a quick tomato stew. All three assume the cook already knows how to bring a sweetbread to the point the recipe calls "blanched."
- Preparing the sweetbreads firstNeither "wash and boil" nor "blanched" tells the whole story. Soak veal sweetbreads in several changes of cold water for a few hours to draw the blood, then simmer gently 15-20 minutes, cool in the liquid, peel off the outer membrane and gristle, and press between two plates under a weight until firm. Unpressed sweetbreads slice raggedly and will not hold their shape in the shells.
- Buying themAsk for veal sweetbreads; the rounded heart piece, the "noix," is the prime cut and the elongated throat sweetbread is looser and cheaper. Weights vary a good deal, so check what you are buying. Lamb sweetbreads are smaller and cook faster.
- The salt is boilerplateA tablespoonful of salt and a teaspoonful of pepper appear as a stock phrase in both of these recipes. For four sweetbreads that is far too much salt by modern palates; start with a teaspoon and correct at the end.
- Old measuresA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup. A wineglassful runs about 2 fl oz, making the half glass about 1 fl oz, or 2 tablespoons. A teacupful in this period is usually reckoned at 5 to 6 fl oz, less than a full modern cup.
- Sauces named, not givenBechamel "half reduced" means simmered down until it mounds on a spoon, thick enough that the filling sets cold and does not run in the pastry. Spanish sauce is espagnole, the brown veal-stock sauce; a good reduced brown stock or demi-glace stands in. Thick white sauce is a heavy bechamel.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given for the rissoles. Puff pastry wants a hot oven, 425F, for 18-22 minutes until deep gold and fully puffed at the seams. The scallop shells only need browning under a hot oven or broiler for five minutes, as stated, since everything in them is already cooked.
- Crushed vermicelliDry vermicelli broken very fine and scattered over the egg wash, a Victorian coating that bakes to a crisp bristly crust. Fine dried breadcrumbs or panko give a similar effect if you would rather not crush pasta.
- Sealing the rissolesFold and press the damp pastry firmly before cutting, and cut so the sealed edge falls well inside the half-moon. A leaking rissole empties itself onto the tray. Chill the shaped pastries 20 minutes before they go into the oven.
- YieldOne pound of puff paste and two sweetbreads should make roughly a dozen rissoles, enough for about six as a first course. The scalloped version is written for six shells; the Catalane stew, made with four sweetbreads, will serve about four.
- The napkinPiling fried and baked items on a folded napkin was standard service of the period, meant to absorb fat and steam. It works, and a linen napkin on the platter still keeps pastry from going soft underneath.
Oscar Tschirky, maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, published his Cook Book in 1896, and its sweetbread chapter reflects how central the ingredient was to expensive American dining at the turn of the century. Sweetbreads were the delicate, faintly luxurious thing a hotel kitchen could dress in a dozen French manners, and Oscar's dishes carry the standard names of the repertoire: Richelieu for a breadcrumbed gratin with truffle, Catalane for the garlic, tomato and pepper treatment associated with Catalonia. The rissole is older than any of them: the name goes back to Old French roissole, and the form, a savory filling sealed in pastry and cooked to a crust, appears in medieval French and English cookery long before it settled into the pastry course of a hotel menu. What dates the recipe most precisely is the assumption underneath it, that the reader already has bechamel and espagnole standing on the stove and needs only to be told which one to reach for.