No. 1564

Sweetbreads, Portuguese Style

Ris de Veau a la Portugaise

Blanch and dress the sweetbreads as told in No. 1550; trim them into quarter inch thick slices and sauté colorless in butter; when almost done finish cooking in a half-glaze sauce (No. 413), work in a little fresh butter and Madeira; just when ready add as much Portuguese sauce (No. 526) and let reduce till this becomes of a sufficient consistency, then add some olives stuffed with quenelle forcemeat (No. 89) containing anchovy butter (No. 569). Poach in the sauce then dress the olives on the bottom of a dish, lay the sweet-breads on top and cover with a part of the sauce, then dress the olives on the bottom of a dish, lay the sweet-breads on top and cover with a part of the sauce, serving the remainder apart.

← No. 1563 Sweetbreads, Piedmontese Style Veal No. 1565 Sweetbreads a la Princesse →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes in cross-references, so half this dish lives on other pages. Here is what those numbers stand for and where the technique actually turns.

Sweetbread preparation (No. 1550)Soak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water until they run pale, blanch them briefly in salted water, then refresh in ice water, peel off the membrane and press between two plates under a light weight until cold and firm. Only a pressed sweetbread will slice cleanly into the quarter-inch escalopes this recipe wants.
"Sauté colorless""Saute colorless" -- This is the hinge. The slices go into foaming butter over moderate heat and must stay ivory-white: no browning, no fond.
Half-glaze (No. 413)Demi-glace: brown veal stock and espagnole reduced together to a glossy, lightly syrupy sauce. A well-reduced brown veal stock, mounted with butter, stands in for it acceptably. Add the Madeira off the boil so it keeps its perfume.
Portuguese sauce (No. 526)In classical usage this is a tomato sauce built on onion sweated in oil or butter, with garlic, peeled and chopped tomatoes and a little stock, cooked down. It is not a bottled product and it should be thick before it meets the demi-glace, or the finished sauce will be thin.
The stuffed olivesLarge green olives, pitted and hollowed, filled with the quenelle forcemeat (No. 89) into which anchovy butter (No. 569) has been worked. Pipe the forcemeat in with a small bag. Blanch the olives in water first if they are very salty, since the anchovy butter is already salt.
Poaching the olivesThey go into the finished sauce at a bare shiver rather than a simmer, just long enough to set the forcemeat; a few minutes should do it. Ranhofer gives no temperature or time. A boil will burst them and cloud the sauce with forcemeat.
The repeated lineThe sentence about dressing the olives on the bottom of the dish appears twice; that is a typesetting duplication in the original, not a second step.
YieldRanhofer gives none, and no quantities of any kind are stated. As a rough modern estimate, two whole veal sweetbreads with a dozen stuffed olives would serve about four as a course.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows how the book is built: a short paragraph of instruction resting on a numbered scaffold of stocks, sauces and forcemeats set out elsewhere in the volume. "A la portugaise" in nineteenth-century French kitchen usage signals tomato, onion and garlic, the trio that classical cooks associated with the Iberian and Mediterranean south rather than with Portugal specifically; the naming convention is culinary shorthand, not a claim of origin. Sweetbreads — the thymus and pancreas of the calf — were a luxury item on American restaurant menus of the period, prized for their delicacy and their willingness to take on a sauce, and Delmonico's ran dozens of variations on them. The stuffed olive here does the work a garnish was expected to do in that era: it supplies a second texture, a salt-and-anchovy counterpoint, and a bit of theater when the sweetbreads are lifted off to reveal them.