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Tongue, Sweetbread, Calf's: Animelle
No. 112. Animelle alla Parmegiana (Sweetbread) (Sweet- Ingredients:
Sweetbread, bread crumbs, Parmesan, butter.
Blanch as many sweetbreads as you require, and then roll them in bread crumbs mixed with grated Parmesan, salt, and pepper; wrap them up in buttered grease-proof paper and grill them. When they are cooked, take off the paper, and serve with a good sauce in a sauce-boat.
No. 113. Animelle in Cartoccio (Sweetbread) Ingredients: Sweetbread, butter, herbs, salt, pepper, bread crumbs, Parmesan, lemons, gravy, tomatoes.
Blanch a pound of sweetbread cuttings, mix it with two ounces of melted butter, chopped herbs, salt, and pepper, and put it into paper soufflé cases. Then strew over each some bread crumbs mixed with grated Parmesan, put the cases in the oven, and when they are browned serve either with good gravy and lemon juice or with tomato sauce (No. 9).
No. 114. Animelle all' Italiana (Sweetbread) Ingredients:
Sweetbread, butter, onions, salt, herbs, eggs, glaze, Risotto (No. 190), truffles, quenelles of fowl, Espagnole sauce, white sauce.
Blanch as many sweetbreads as you require, cut them into quarters and sautez them in butter with a small onion cut up, salt, and a bunch of herbs. Then pour over them two cups of white sauce and cook gently for twenty minutes; take out the sweetbreads and put them in a stewpan. Reduce the sauce, and add to it a mixture made of the yolks of four eggs, one and a half ounce of butter and a teaspoonful of glaze; pass it through a sieve, pour it over the sweetbreads, and keep them warm in a bain-marie. Have ready a good Risotto all' Italiana (No. 190), and put it into a border mould (but first decorate the inside of the mould with slices of truffle), put it in a moderate oven, and when it is firm turn it out on a dish.
Place the sweetbreads on the risotto and fill in the centre with quenelles of fowl and Espagnole sauce (No. 1).
No. 115. Animelle Lardellate (Sweetbread) Ingredients: Sweetbreads, larding, bacon, stock, a macédoine of vegetables.
Blanch two sweetbreads, lard them, and cook them very slowly in good stock.
Skim the stock and reduce it to a glaze to cover the sweetbreads. Then cut them into three or four pieces and arrange them round a dish, but see that the larding is well glazed over. In the centre of the dish place a piece of bread in the shape of a cup and fill this with a macédoine of vegetables.
No. 116. Frittura di Bottoni e di Animelle (Sweetbread and Mushrooms) Ingredients: Sweetbread, fresh button mushrooms, flour, bread crumbs, salt, pepper, parsley, butter, lemons.
Peel some button mushrooms and cut them in halves.
Boil a sweetbread, and cut it into pieces about the same size as the mushrooms, flour, egg, and bread crumb them, and fry in butter; then serve with a garnish of fried parsley. Hand cut lemons with this dish.
Five treatments of calf's sweetbreads, all of which assume the cook already knows how to prepare them — the book takes the first and most important step almost for granted.
- "Blanch" means more than a quick dipSweetbreads need soaking in several changes of cold water until the water runs clear, then a slow bring-up to a simmer for 3-5 minutes, then a plunge into iced water. After that the membrane and any gristle peel away and the meat firms enough to slice or lard. Skipping the soak leaves them bloody and metallic-tasting.
- Press them before cookingAfter blanching, lay the sweetbreads between two plates with a weight on top for an hour in the fridge. The book omits this; it helps give the firm, evenly sized pieces No. 116 calls for, though No. 112 grills them whole.
- Which gland you are buyingAnimelle covers both the throat (elongated) and heart or stomach (round, plumper) sweetbreads of a calf. The heart sweetbread is the one worth the money and the one these recipes suit; throat sweetbreads are stringier and better in the chopped filling of No. 113.
- Grease-proof paper and cartoccioNo. 112 wants the sweetbreads grilled in a buttered paper parcel — parchment does this job; foil will steam rather than colour them. In cartoccio simply means "in a paper case", and the paper soufflé cases of No. 113 are the small pleated ones sold for baking, not modern fluted cupcake liners, which are too shallow.
- Oven temperatureA "moderate oven" is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F/175-190C. That suits both the browning of No. 113, which specifies no temperature, and the setting of the risotto border in No. 114, which may need 15-20 minutes to firm up before turning out.
- Glaze, quenelles, macédoineGlaze is meat stock reduced to a syrup that sets on cooling — a good demi-glace or heavily reduced veal stock stands in. Quenelles of fowl are poached dumplings of pounded chicken and cream. A macédoine is diced mixed vegetables, cooked separately and dressed in butter.
- The egg liaison in No. 114Four yolks with butter and glaze are stirred into the reduced sauce off the boil; once it goes back on the heat it must not exceed about 180F/82C or it curdles before it passes the sieve. The bain-marie afterwards is for holding, not further cooking.
- Larding in No. 115Threading strips of back fat through the meat with a larding needle is largely a lost technique and pork back fat is hard to find. Wrapping the blanched sweetbreads in thin sheets of lardo or unsmoked streaky bacon before the slow braise achieves the same basting effect, though it will not give the striped surface the recipe wants glazed.
- Cook them throughSweetbreads are offal and are not served pink. Whatever the method, the interior should be firm and opaque — an internal 160F/71C is a reasonable target for a whole gland.
- YieldAllow about 5-6 oz of trimmed sweetbread per person as a main course, half that as a first course. The pound of cuttings in No. 113 will fill several souffle cases, depending on their size.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) is Mrs W. G. Waters' collection of Italian dishes hung on a Boccaccian frame, with the recipes gathered at the back. It was written for English households at a moment when Italian cooking was being presented to them as light, economical and a corrective to heavy Victorian roasting hence the paper cases, the lemon, the tomato sauce. Sweetbreads sat at the top of the offal hierarchy in that period and were priced accordingly; a good butcher's shop sold them as a delicacy for invalids and for dinner-party entr tes alike, and their neutral, creamy texture made them a natural vehicle for the truffle-and-glaze dressing of No. 114. The Italian animelle, like the English "sweetbread", is a euphemism of long standing whose origin is not documented the second element is generally traced to Old English bræd, flesh, rather than to bread.