Home › The World's Kitchen › Cromesky of Sweetbreads
Cromesky of Sweetbreads
Soak six sweetbreads in cold water for two hours. Remove and plunge them in boiling water for five minutes. Drain, then neatly trim all around and place them in a saucepan with a sliced carrot a sliced onion, half an ounce lard cut into small pieces, one-half gill white wine and one pint broth. Season with a teaspoon salt, cover the pan and let slowly boil for twenty minutes. Lift up the breads with a skimmer and cut them into quarter-inch-square pieces, and keep them on a plate until required.
Mix in a saucepan one ounce butter with two ounces flour. Skim fat from the surface of the bread broth, then strain it through a Chinese strainer into this roux. Mix well and let reduce to one-half the quantity, frequently mixing meanwhile. Add six finely chopped canned mushrooms, one saltspoon cayenne, half a saltspoon grated nutmeg, two tablespoons sherry, three tablespoons cream and two egg yolks. Sharply mix with a whisk while cooking for two minutes. Add the breads, gently mix, then cook for two minutes. Transfer to a dish and let cool off.
Divide the force into twelve even parts, roll each part in fresh bread crumbs and give them nice cork-shaped forms. Have a frying batter, roll each croquette into the batter and gently drop them into boiling fat and fry for ten minutes, turning them with the skimmer once in a while, lift up, drain on a cloth and trim them well. Arrange on hot dish with a folded napkin, decorate with a little parsley greens and serve with one gill tomato sauce separately. N.B. After the force has been divided into twelve parts each part should be enveloped in pancakes of same size instead of rolling them in bread crumbs, but it would cause considerable additional work and the result would be about the same.
A two-stage dish: a braised sweetbread salpicon bound with a thick velouté, chilled hard, then shaped and fried. Almost everything that goes wrong here happens at the chilling stage.
- Chill the force until it is truly firm"Let cool off" is doing a lot of work. The bound mixture needs several hours in the refrigerator, ideally overnight, until it can be cut like cold butter. A warm or merely tepid force will slump off the skimmer and burst in the fat.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup, so the wine is 1/4 cup and the tomato sauce half a cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. The ounces of butter, flour and lard are weights, not fluid ounces: 1 oz butter is 2 tablespoons, 2 oz flour is a scant half cup.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. Any fine sieve does the job; the point is to catch the carrot, onion and any stray membrane before the broth meets the roux.
- Sweetbreads todaySweetbreads are an order-ahead item from a butcher; the elongated "throat" sweetbread is the thymus, the rounder "heart" one the pancreas. Six of them is a generous quantity for twelve cromeskies. The cold soak is to draw blood, and the water should be changed once or twice.
- The frying timeTen minutes is far too long. The filling is fully cooked before it ever meets the fat, so the fry is only to set the coating: three to four minutes at 350-375F, until deep gold. Longer and the interior boils, steam builds, and the crust splits.
- Crumbs and batterAs written the shapes are rolled in crumbs and then dipped in batter, which is unusual. Keep the coat thin, and let the battered pieces go straight into the fat rather than standing.
- Egg yolks in the sauceTwo yolks going into a reducing velouté will scramble if the pan is at a rolling boil. Pull it back to a bare simmer, whisk hard as the note says, and count the two minutes from there.
- The pancake variantThe N.B. describes what is usually taken as the defining form of a cromesky, each portion wrapped in a thin pancake before battering rather than crumbed.
- YieldTwelve pieces, which serves four to six as a first course with the tomato sauce passed separately.
Cromesky is generally taken to be an anglicisation of a Polish or Russian word (kromeski, kromeskie), though the derivation is not firmly established. By the late nineteenth century the form was recognised in professional French kitchens: a croquette mixture wrapped in something -- commonly a thin pancake or a slice of bacon -- then battered and deep fried, as against the plain crumbed croquette. Escoffier includes cromesquis among the hot hors-d'oeuvre and small entries, which is roughly the slot this recipe occupies. Filippini's note that the pancake wrapping causes "considerable additional work and the result would be about the same" reads as a hotel chef writing for a domestic audience, conceding the definitional point in exchange for a dish that can be got out of a home kitchen. Sweetbreads were then a familiar rather than exotic luxury, appearing regularly on club and hotel menus and often recommended in invalid cookery.