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Stewed Veal with Oyster Plant
Prepare and cook the same as for stewed veal bourgeoise, putting in place of the garnishing one bunch of well cleaned raw oyster plant cut into pieces forty minutes prior to serving.
How to Prepare Sweetbreads Leave a dozen sweetbreads in cold water for two hours to disgorge, then change the water and boil them for a few moments on a hot fire; take them off and refresh in cold water; cut away all the windpipes and fibrous nerves and then prepare them as required in the various recipes.
Two fragments run together here: a variation on the house stewed veal, and the standing kitchen procedure for sweetbreads that the book's other recipes assume. Both are written for a brigade cook who already knows the base dish.
- Oyster plant is salsifyNot a shellfish and not a mushroom: Tragopogon porrifolius, a long tapering root whose cooked flavour was thought to suggest oysters. Black salsify (scorzonera) is the more common supermarket stand-in and behaves the same way.
- Peel into acidulated waterCut salsify oxidises to a dull grey within minutes and exudes a sticky white latex. Peel it under running water and drop the pieces straight into water with lemon juice or a spoonful of vinegar.
- Forty minutes is generousThat timing suits thick old winter roots simmering in a heavy braise. Young salsify cut into two-inch lengths is tender in 20 to 30 minutes; add it late enough that it holds its shape rather than collapsing into the sauce.
- What bourgeoise means hereThe garnish being displaced is the standard a la bourgeoise trio of glazed baby onions, turned carrots and lardons of bacon. Everything else about the stew as given in the book's base recipe is unchanged.
- A dozen sweetbreads is restaurant scaleThat is a hotel's service quantity. For a household, one pair of veal sweetbreads (about a pound) serves two to three; the soaking and blanching times are unaffected by scaling down.
- DisgorgingThe two hours in cold water draws out blood and leaves the sweetbreads pale. Change the water two or three times over the period, and keep the bowl refrigerated rather than on the counter.
- "Boil a few moments" is a blanchOnly a brief plunge into boiling water, long enough to firm the exterior so the membrane peels. This is not cooking; the sweetbreads are finished later in whichever recipe calls for them.
- Trimming, and pressingThe "windpipes and fibrous nerves" are the connective ducts and the tough outer membrane, all of which come away easily once the sweetbreads are refreshed and cold. Some kitchens then press them flat between two plates under a weight for an hour, which Oscar leaves unsaid.
Oscar Tschirky was never a chef, he was the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel, but his 1896 Cook Book set down the working repertoire of a great New York hotel kitchen at the height of the Franco-American grand style. Salsify was ordinary market produce in the nineteenth-century United States, sold under the name oyster plant and eaten fried in batter, in mock oyster soup, or, as here, as a braising vegetable; it faded from American greengrocers over the twentieth century and now turns up mainly in farmers' markets and European shops. The sweetbread procedure tacked on at the end shows how such books were actually organised: rather than repeat soaking and blanching in every entry, a kitchen wrote the method once and cross-referenced it, which is why the passage reads as though it wandered in from another page.