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Sweetbreads with Mushrooms
Boil the sweetbreads for twenty or twenty-five minutes, then cut them into small pieces, place them in a saucepan with an equal amount of chopped mushrooms, cover with a cream sauce and boil them for a few minutes. Turn the mixture onto a hot dish, garnish with croutons of fried bread, and serve.
Oscar assumes a cook who already knows how to handle sweetbreads and a stockpot of cream sauce standing ready. Both need filling in, and the boiling times need moderating.
- Buy the right glandSweetbreads are the thymus (throat sweetbread, longer and more irregular) and the pancreas (heart sweetbread, the plump rounded lobe). The heart sweetbread holds together best when cut up; expect to order either ahead.
- Soak and peel firstThe recipe skips a step that period cookery books generally call for. Soak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water for a few hours until they lose their pinkness, then blanch, cool, and pull away the outer membrane and any tubes before slicing.
- Twenty-five minutes is too longA blanch of 5 to 8 minutes in barely simmering salted water firms them enough to cut and peel; a full 20 to 25 at a boil makes them dense and dry. They then get a second cooking in the sauce, so err short on the first.
- Do not boil the sauce"Boil them for a few minutes" in the sauce is better read as a gentle simmer. Held at a rolling boil the sauce can catch or over-reduce, and the sweetbreads toughen further.
- Cream sauce, in period termsThis means a white roux thinned with milk or veal stock and finished with cream — about 1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon flour and a cup of liquid per pound of sweetbreads. Season with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg; a squeeze of lemon at the end lifts it.
- The mushroomsEqual weight of mushrooms to sweetbreads is a large amount and they carry water. Cook them in butter until their liquid has evaporated before they meet the sauce, or the dish will loosen on the plate.
- CroutonsHere these are small pieces of crustless bread, often cut as triangles or crescents, fried until crisp and set around the edge of the dish. Add them at the last moment so they stay dry.
- YieldA pound of sweetbreads with a pound of mushrooms serves four as a lunch or supper dish, or six in patty shells or on toast.
Sweetbreads were a luxury of the American hotel dining room in Oscar Tschirky's day, and they appear repeatedly in this book — braised, larded, creamed, and in various other forms. The gland is small, perishable and had to be ordered from the butcher fresh, which is precisely what made it a mark of a well-provisioned kitchen; the French ris de veau carried the same prestige. Creaming them with mushrooms seems to have been a common treatment for a ladies' luncheon or a light supper course, and versions of it are said to turn up on hotel and club menus of the period under various names. The dish faded from American tables in the later twentieth century along with most offal, though it never left the French repertoire.