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Timbale of Sweetbread
Wash some sweetbreads, put them in a saucepan with cold water and a lump of salt and boil for ten minutes; then put them into cold water and leave until quite cold, then lard them with thin strips of fat bacon. Place the sweetbreads in a stewpan with some well-flavored stock (which should reach to a little more than half their height) and stew them gently for about an hour, basting frequently. When cooked, leave them until cold, then cut them into thin slices. Butter a timbale-mould and line it with a short paste about one-eighth of an inch thick; fill it with alternate layers of sweetbread, nicely flavored forcemeat and mushrooms, seasoning between each layer with pepper and salt. Strain the cooking-liquor of the sweetbreads, skim it well and pour it over the contents of the mould. Cover the timbale with paste and put it in the oven, fixing it in position with ashes heaped up on both sides, When cooked turn the timbale out of the mould onto a hot dish, garnish with parsley and mushroom tops, and serve.
Sweetbreads, Toulouse Steep the sweetbreads until all the blood is drawn out of them, then blanch them in boiling water for five minutes or until they are firm. Drain the sweetbreads and leave them till cold, then trim and lard them thickly. Place a layer of sliced onion, carrot and celery at the bottom of a sautepan, put in the cutlets of sweetbreads and pour in a little stock, but not sufficient to cover them. Glaze the sweetbreads in a hot oven for about twenty minutes, basting them occasionally with their cooking liquor. Cook some asparagus tops and make a bed of them on a hot dish. When well browned and glazed drain the sweetbreads and pile them on the asparagus. Pass the cooking liquor through a silk sieve, skim off all the fat, pour it over the sweetbreads, and serve. Sweetbread Vol-au-Vent, Financiere Prepare one pound of puff paste and roll it out to about two and one-half inches in thickness. Cut a round out of the paste with a tin cutter, brush the round over with a paste brush dipped in beaten egg without touching the sides, and with a knife, the point being held inwards towards the center, make a circular incision pressing the inner paste to prevent its closing up again. Make a lid with some of the remaining paste to fit in the wall of the vol-au-vent, brush the top over with beaten egg, place the paste on a baking-sheet and bake for half an hour in a moderate oven. Put one ounce of butter and a tablespoonful of flour in a stewpan, stir it over the fire until well mixed, then pour in gradually one pint of stock and keep stirring over the fire until boiling. Put one wineglassful of sherry, two tablespoonfuls of mushroom ketchup and a little cayenne pepper in the sauce, move it to the side of the fire and let it simmer gently for fifteen minutes for the purpose of clarifying it; then skim it, put in a piece of glaze, put it on the fire and let it boil quickly for five minutes longer. When the glaze has dissolved, strain the sauce through a fine hair-sieve into another saucepan, put in it two partially-boiled calf's sweetbreads, three or four cockscombs, a few truffles and mushrooms, all cut up into fairly small pieces. Boil the sauce gently until the sweetbreads, etc., are cooked, then season to suit the taste with pepper and salt. When cooked take the vol-au-vent out of the oven, remove the center carefully without damaging the case, put the above mixture into it and then cover with the lid. Place the vol-au-vent on a folded napkin on a hot dish and serve while very hot. If the cases are made and cooked before the mixture with which to fill them is ready, they can always be placed in an oven and warmed again.
Sweetbreads, Waldorf Disgorge some sweetbreads in cold water for one hour, change the water and boil them over a slow fire for half an hour, then refresh and lay them under a weight for another half hour; remove and lard with small fat pork lardings. Line the bottom of a saucepan with the fragments of fat pork, parsley roots, a slice or two of carrot and a minced onion; add a little white broth and the sweetbreads, and leave to simmer for half an hour. Dress them onto artichoke bottoms, laid on a dish, half a sweetbread on each, and serve with a brown sauce containing chopped truffles and small chicken quenelles.
Four Waldorf preparations of sweetbread, all built on the same foundation: soak, blanch, press, lard, braise. The instructions assume a kitchen brigade, a coal range and a larder that stocked cockscombs. Most of it translates cleanly.
- Which sweetbreadVeal sweetbreads are sold as the heart (round and compact) and the throat (elongated, stringier). The heart sweetbread is what these dishes want for slicing and for cutlets. Reckon roughly 1 lb to serve three or four as a course.
- Disgorging and pressingThe soaking in cold water, changed at least once, is not optional fussiness: it draws out blood so the finished meat is pale. After blanching and cooling, peel away the outer membrane and the tougher connective tissue before pressing between two plates with a weight. Only the Waldorf version here calls for weighting, but pressing is what gives flat, even cutlets.
- LardingThreading strips of fat pork or bacon through the meat with a larding needle was standard practice; sweetbreads are lean and dry out under a hot glaze. Barding — draping thin sheets of fatback or unsmoked bacon over the top and tying it — does the same work without the needle.
- Oven temperatures'Moderate oven' for the vol-au-vent case is conventionally read as about 350-375F, though puff pastry is better started nearer 400F and dropped once the layers have lifted. 'Hot oven' for glazing the Toulouse sweetbreads is usually taken as 425-450F, and twenty minutes at that heat with frequent basting is what builds the lacquer.
- Ashes heaped on both sidesAn instruction from range cookery, where a timbale mould was steadied and insulated in the ash bed so the pastry sides would not scorch before the filling set. In a modern oven, stand the mould in a roasting tin or on a heavy sheet on a lower rack.
- Glaze, ketchup, sievesA "piece of glaze" is glace de viande, stock reduced to a syrup — a tablespoon of commercial demi-glace concentrate stands in. Mushroom ketchup is a thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, still made in Britain; a mix of soy sauce and mushroom soaking liquor approximates it. A silk or fine hair sieve is a chinois lined with muslin.
- Cockscombs and trufflesCockscombs are a characteristic element of a garniture financiere and are now hard to source outside specialist butchers; leave them out rather than substitute. Fresh truffle can be replaced by a small quantity of preserved truffle or omitted, in which case lean on good stock and mushrooms for depth.
- Puff paste thicknessRolling puff paste 'two and one-half inches' thick for a vol-au-vent is extreme and looks like an error; period instructions generally call for something nearer an inch. Roll to about an inch, cut the round, score the inner lid ring most of the way through, and expect a considerable rise.
- Don't overcook the braiseAn hour of gentle stewing suits a large whole sweetbread in stock that comes a little more than halfway up it; smaller ones are likely to be done in 30-40 minutes and can turn cottony past that. The meat should yield to a skewer but still hold its shape for slicing cold.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf, and later the Waldorf-Astoria, from 1893, and his 1896 Cook Book is essentially a record of what a large American hotel kitchen of the period cooked when it was cooking French. Sweetbreads sat near the top of that repertoire: expensive, delicate, requiring a full day of soaking, blanching, pressing and larding before they ever reached a sauce, and therefore a reliable signal of a serious kitchen. The garnishes here are the standard classical ones — à la Toulouse, generally traced to a white ragoût garnish of sweetbread, quenelles and mushrooms, and financière, the truffle-and-cockscomb mixture whose name is usually explained as a nod to its cost. The vol-au-vent and the pastry-lined timbale belong to the same tradition of serving rich ragoûts inside an edible case, a habit that reaches back well before the nineteenth century. What dates the page most sharply is not technique but supply: cockscombs, parsley roots and glace de viande were things a hotel larder simply had on hand.