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Sweetbreads in Cases
Boil the sweetbreads, then drain and cut them into small pieces, place them in some cream sauce, and season it with pepper and salt. Fill some paper cases with the above mixture, cover them with breadcrumbs, put one tablespoonful of warmed butter in each, and place them in the oven. When the mixture is nicely browned on the top, remove the cases from the oven, arrange them on a folded napkin laid on a dish, and serve.
A short Waldorf entry that assumes the cook already knows how to handle sweetbreads and how to make a cream sauce. Both assumptions need filling in.
- Buy the right glandSweetbreads are the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb; the heart or stomach sweetbread from veal is the round, compact one and the better choice here. They often have to be ordered from a butcher, and are frequently sold frozen.
- Soak and press before boilingThe step Oscar leaves out: soak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water for two to three hours to draw the blood, then poach rather than hard-boil, about 15 minutes in salted water with a splash of lemon or vinegar. Cool them, peel off the outer membrane and the tougher connective tissue, and press between two plates under a weight for an hour so they slice cleanly.
- "Cream sauce"In this kitchen that means a white sauce built on a butter-and-flour roux with cream or a cream-and-veal-stock mixture, cooked out until it no longer tastes of flour. It should be thick enough to hold the pieces in a mound, not to pour.
- Paper casesCaisses are pleated cases of stiff parchment or greased paper, made oven-proof by brushing with oil or butter. Small ramekins, ovenproof cocottes or foil-lined paper baking cups do the same job; scallop shells were the other common option.
- Oven heatThe original names no temperature. The dish is already cooked and only needs browning, so a hot oven -- around 425F -- for 10 to 12 minutes, or a few minutes under the broiler, is enough. A long bake at moderate heat will only dry the filling.
- Ease the butterA tablespoon of melted butter per case is generous by any standard and will pool. A teaspoon drizzled over the crumbs browns them just as well; the crumbs themselves are better if tossed in the butter first.
- Yield and servingA pair of veal sweetbreads, roughly 1 lb before trimming, fills six to eight small cases as a first course. The folded napkin steadies hot cases on a service platter, though it was also simply the conventional way such dishes were sent to table.
Sweetbreads were a luxury of the American hotel dining room in Oscar Tschirky's day, standing on the menu alongside terrapin and canvasback duck, and the Waldorf served them creamed, larded, braised and, as here, in cases. The caisse, a small pleated paper container baked with a rich filling, came into American hotel cookery from the French repertoire, where it let a kitchen turn a modest quantity of expensive meat into an individually plated course, with the paper serving both as cooking vessel and as presentation. Offal of this kind has since drifted out of general use in the United States, but the technique here, poach, trim, press, bind in a sauce and gratinate, is still the standard handling of sweetbreads in classical kitchens. The folded napkin under the dish is a small survival of Victorian and Edwardian table service, which liked its hot dishes to arrive on white linen.