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Escalopes of Sweetbreads with Peas
Blanch and trim six sweetbreads. Cut each in four even slices. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper, then lightly roll in flour. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, arrange in the slices, one beside another as much as possible, and gently fry for six minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a hot dish, one overlapping another, crown like. Spread a maitre d'hotel butter over. Place green peas in the centre of the breads and serve.
A straightforward sauté that assumes you already know how to prepare sweetbreads — which is where nearly all the work lies. Everything after the blanching is fifteen minutes' cooking.
- Blanch and trim, in fullThe single instruction the recipe skips over. Soak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water for 3-4 hours to draw out blood, then simmer 3-5 minutes in salted water with a splash of vinegar, cool in ice water, and peel away the membrane and any gristle. Press between two plates under a weight in the refrigerator for a few hours so they slice cleanly.
- What a sweetbread isVeal thymus (the elongated "throat") or pancreas (the rounder, more prized "heart"). Both were standard butcher stock when this book was written; today they are a special order from a butcher and usually frozen. Six will come to several pounds, depending on size.
- EscalopesCutting each into four gives thin cutlets rather than chunks; the actual thickness depends on the size of the sweetbread. Pressing first makes even slices easier.
- Six minutes a side is too longSix minutes a side is probably longer than needed -- half-inch slices of already-blanched sweetbread will usually take 3-4 minutes a side over medium-high heat, to a deep gold crust. At modern stove heat the longer timing risks a dry interior and a toughened exterior.
- Butter and panTwo tablespoons will not carry 24 slices without scorching. Work in batches, adding fresh butter, or use half butter and half neutral oil so the milk solids do not blacken between batches.
- Maître d'hôtel butterNot a sauce but a compound butter: softened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and white pepper, roughly 2 tablespoons parsley and the juice of half a lemon per stick. Spread it cold over the hot slices so it melts into them at the table.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt and half a teaspoon of white pepper is for the whole batch of six, distributed across the flour and the slices — not per sweetbread.
- The peasFresh or frozen peas, briefly cooked and tossed in butter, mounded in the centre of the ring. Drain them well; watery peas will slacken the compound butter into a puddle.
- YieldServes six as a main course, four slices each.
Sweetbreads sat near the top of the nineteenth-century menu hierarchy: delicate, expensive, quick to spoil, and therefore a mark of a well-run kitchen. Escalope simply means a thin slice cut across the grain and cooked flat, and the whole construction here — cutlets overlapped in a ring, a vegetable heaped in the centre, a compound butter melting over the top — is standard French service of the period; the ring arrangement the recipe calls "crown like" is what French kitchens termed en couronne. Maître d'hôtel butter, parsley and lemon worked into butter, is generally traced to early nineteenth-century Parisian restaurant practice and became the all-purpose finish for grilled and sautéed meats precisely because it needed no stock, no reduction and no last-minute attention. That an American book of 1929 files this under "The World's Kitchen" says less about internationalism than about how completely French technique still defined ambitious cooking in English-speaking households.