No. 2271

Sweetbread Cutlets, Modern Style

Cotelettes de Ris de Veau a la Moderne

Cut one pound of sweetbreads into slices; season and cook with some butter in a sautoir, turning them over when done on one side; drain, let get cold under a weight, then cut up into small quarter-inch dice pieces; lay them in a tureen with half a pound of cooked mushrooms cut the same size, and a quarter of a pound of unsmoked beef tongue cut in three-sixteenths inch dice; mix this salpicon with some allemande sauce (No. 407), bring to a boil, stir well with a reducing spatula and set it away to cool in a dish; when cold shape it into cutlets, dip them in beaten eggs, then in bread-crumbs and fry; then dress in a circle, garnish with favor frills (No. 10) and pour a financiere sauce (No. 464) into the bottom of the dish.

← No. 2270 Cutlets of Squabs in Papers Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2272 Sweetbread Cutlets a la Talleyrand →

For the Modern Kitchen

A croquette in cutlet shape: a bound salpicon chilled firm, breaded and fried, then dressed with two classical sauces. Ranhofer assumes you have already cleaned the sweetbreads, and everything depends on the binding being stiff enough to hold.

Sweetbreads need prep the recipe skipsThe Epicurean treats soaking and blanching as understood from earlier entries. Soak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water for a few hours, blanch briefly, cool, and peel away the outer membrane and gristle before slicing and sauteing.
SautoirA straight-sided saute pan, not a sloped skillet. Any wide heavy pan works; the point is enough surface area to color the slices without crowding.
Pressing under a weightThis is not optional. Weighting the cooked slices between plates while they cool compacts them so the quarter-inch dice hold their shape instead of shredding into the sauce.
Allemande sauceA veal veloute finished with egg yolks, cream and lemon. It must be reduced thick here, thicker than you would ever serve it as a sauce, or the salpicon will not set into shapeable cutlets.
Financiere sauceA demi-glace enriched with Madeira and truffle or mushroom essence, in the period usually with a garnish of cockscombs and quenelles. A good Madeira-spiked demi-glace is the practical substitute.
Unsmoked beef tonguePlain boiled or brined-but-unsmoked tongue, sold as pickled tongue in some butchers. Do not use smoked tongue, which will dominate the delicate sweetbread.
Chill hard before shapingSpread the mixture no more than an inch deep and refrigerate several hours, ideally overnight. Warm salpicon cannot be molded, and cutlets shaped from soft mixture burst in the fat.
FryingDeep fry at 350-365F for two to three minutes, until the crumb is set and golden. Everything inside is already cooked; the fry is for the crust only.
Favor frillsThe paper frills of No. 10, fitted over the narrow end of each cutlet. Purely decorative and easily omitted.
YieldAbout two pounds of finished mixture, or roughly eight to ten cutlets: four to six as an entree course.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for some three decades, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working repertoire set down in about a thousand pages of cross-references. This dish shows the method at its most characteristic: nothing is made from scratch on the page, since the allemande and financiere sauces live at numbers 407 and 464 and the sweetbread cleaning is assumed from elsewhere in the book. Calling a croquette a cotelette and dressing it with a paper frill was a common nineteenth-century conceit, the frill signalling a chop where there was no bone at all. Sweetbreads were a prestige item on American hotel and club menus of the period; the taste for them in the United States faded through the twentieth century.