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Fried Sweetbreads, Montebello
Blanch and trim six heart sweetbreads, split in two, season all over with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, lightly roll in flour, dip in beaten egg, then lightly roll in freshly prepared bread crumbs. Thoroughly heat two tablespoons melted butter in sautoir, add breads and gently cook for six minutes on each side, remove, dress on a hot dish with folded napkin, decorate with six quarters lemon, a little parsley greens, and serve with a Montebello sauce separately.
A Delmonico's-style plate that depends almost entirely on how the sweetbreads are handled before they reach the pan. The frying is the easy part.
- "Heart" sweetbreadsThe heart or noix is the round, compact lobe of the thymus, as opposed to the ragged throat sweetbread. Six of them, with the six lemon quarters the recipe calls for, suggests six servings.
- Soak before you blanchThe recipe assumes you already know this: cover the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water for two to three hours to draw out blood, then simmer in salted acidulated water for about 15 minutes, cool in ice water, and peel away the membrane. Press them flat between two plates under a weight for an hour before splitting.
- SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan, not a saucepan. Use one wide enough to hold all twelve halves in a single layer with room around them, or the coating steams instead of browning.
- Two tablespoons of butter is not enoughWhole butter will burn well before twelve minutes of cooking is done. Use clarified butter, or butter with a neutral oil, and about twice the stated amount, adding more as the crumbs drink it up.
- Six minutes a sideThat suits halves about half an inch thick. Sweetbreads are already cooked through from blanching, so the goal is a deep even crust; if the crumbs are colouring too fast, drop the heat rather than shortening the time.
- Freshly prepared bread crumbsSoft crumbs from day-old white bread, not dried packaged crumbs. They brown faster and darker than panko, which is a fair substitute if you want a sturdier coating. Let the breaded halves rest 15 minutes before frying so the coating sets.
- Montebello sauceFilippini gives this separately in the sauce chapter; it is not something you can improvise from this page.
- The folded napkinPeriod service called for the fried items to be dressed on a napkin laid in the platter, which absorbed fat and kept them from sliding. It still works, though a wire rack in a low oven keeps the crust crisper if there is any delay before serving.
Sweetbreads were near the top of the American restaurant hierarchy when this book was assembled: delicate, laborious, expensive, and impossible to fake, which made them exactly the sort of dish a hotel kitchen used to demonstrate competence. Alexander Filippini had spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book reflects that world, where a garnish name told the waiter and the reader which sauce and which trimming belonged to the plate. Names like Montebello came into French professional cookery from the Napoleonic aristocracy and the Italian campaigns — the title of duc de Montebello was granted to Marshal Lannes, and the village gave its name to a battle in 1859 — though as with most garnish names of this kind the connection is traditional rather than documented. What matters practically is that the name was a code: the cook looked up Montebello in the sauce chapter and the dish assembled itself.