No. 2357

Shells of Veal or Lamb Sweetbreads, a la Harper

Coquilles de Ris de Veauou d'Agneau, ala Harper

Braise unlarded sweetbreads; when cooked place them in a dish, pour over the stock and let get cold; merely cut them up into small three-sixteenths inch pieces, add to these half as much fresh mushrooms and a quarter as much unsmoked but salted red beef tongue, all cut the same size, and mix the pieces into some bechamel sauce (No. 409), seasoning with salt and pepper to taste. Butter some shells (Fig. 438), besprinkle each with bread-crumbs, fill with the above preparation and dust the tops with bread raspings and grated cheese; pour melted butter over and brown the surface to a fine color in a hot oven, then dress and serve on folded napkins.

← No. 2356 Shells of Squabs Baked Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2358 Shells of Terrapin with Hazel-Nuts →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade that already has braised sweetbreads and a pot of béchamel on hand, so the recipe reads as an assembly note. The hinge is the cooling step: the sweetbreads must chill in their own braising stock until firm, or they will crumble instead of cutting into clean dice.

Buying and prepping sweetbreadsVeal sweetbreads are glandular offal from a calf, usually sold as a pair: the elongated throat lobe (the thymus proper) and the rounder "heart" sweetbread, which is generally the pancreas and is the more prized of the two; lamb sweetbreads are much smaller and cook faster. They are highly perishable — use within a day, soaking in several changes of cold water until the water runs clear, then blanching briefly and peeling off the membrane before braising. "Unlarded" simply means you skip threading them with strips of pork fat.
Braising and coolingBraise in a shallow pan with buttered aromatics and a little veal stock or broth, covered, roughly 25-35 minutes for veal, until firm and cooked through. Then cool in the stock as directed; chilling them firm in their own stock is what allows clean 3/16-inch dice, and weighting them under a plate in the refrigerator is a common way to help, though Ranhofer does not call for it.
The dice sizeThree-sixteenths of an inch is about 5 mm — a small, even brunoise. Cutting the mushrooms and tongue to the same size is the whole point of the dish; uneven pieces read as leftovers in sauce.
Salted, unsmoked red beef tongueThis is corned or pickled tongue, not smoked. A deli-cooked corned beef tongue works; failing that, corned beef itself is a closer substitute than any smoked product, which would take over the dish. Quantity is a quarter the volume of the sweetbreads, mushrooms half.
Béchamel No. 409Ranhofer's béchamel is a white roux moistened with milk (some versions of the sauce in the book take a little white stock as well), simmered down and strained. Make it thick enough to bind the dice and just coat a spoon — a loose sauce will run out of the shells.
Bread raspingsRaspings are the dried, grated crust of a stale loaf, finer and darker than fresh crumbs. Fine dry breadcrumbs are the modern equivalent; the interior of the shell gets soft fresh crumbs, the top gets the dry ones with grated cheese, which the recipe leaves unspecified — Parmesan is the cheese Ranhofer names elsewhere for gratins.
ShellsThe "shells" are coquilles — real scallop shells or the metal and porcelain shell dishes of the period. Individual gratin dishes or ramekins of about 1/2 cup do the same job.
OvenA "hot oven" in this period is usually taken as somewhere around 425-450°F, though Ranhofer gives no figure; you are only browning an already-cooked filling, so a few minutes should do it, or finish under the broiler. Overbaking dries the sweetbreads and breaks the sauce.
YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; as a rough guide, a pair of veal sweetbreads with mushrooms and tongue will fill four to six shells. The folded napkin is a serving convention of the period, often said to keep the hot shells from sliding on the platter.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it belongs to a family of coquilles — cooked meat, fish or offal bound in sauce, gratinéed in a shell — that let a kitchen turn small quantities of expensive trim into an elegant individual course. Sweetbreads were a luxury item in the nineteenth-century American dining room, sold at high prices and served with a delicacy that later generations of home cooks largely abandoned. Ranhofer worked throughout the book by building variations on a standard formula, which is why the surrounding pages offer shells of squab and shells of terrapin. The unsmoked salted tongue is a period detail worth noting: cured tongue was an everyday larder staple then, kept on hand for garnish and colour in exactly this way.