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Lamb Sweetbreads, Kennedy
Plunge one and a half pounds lamb sweetbreads in a quart boiling water with a teaspoon salt for five minutes, drain on a sieve and neatly trim. Thoroughly heat two tablespoons clarified butter in a sautoir, drop in sweetbreads, sprinkle over a teaspoon salt and briskly cook on open fire for eight minutes, frequently tossing them meanwhile. Pour in a tablespoon brandy and two tablespoons port wine, let reduce till nearly dry, then pour in a half gill white wine, adding a saltspoon cayenne pepper, twelve finely sliced, canned mushrooms and a small sliced truffie, mix well, cover pan and let cook for five minutes. Pour in one and a half gills tomato sauce, a half teaspoon each chopped parsley and extract of beef, mix well, cover pan and cook for ten minutes more. Set pan on corner of range, drop in a half ounce fresh butter little by little, with the juice of a quarter lemon, continually mixing while adding it.
Lightly butter outside of six oval paper boxes, place on a tin, then place in oven for five minutes. Remove, evenly divide preparation in boxes, dress on a hot dish with a folded napkin and serve.
A Delmonico-style sweetbread sauté finished in paper cases. The method is sound, but the vocabulary is 1900s professional kitchen and the sweetbread preparation assumes knowledge the text does not spell out.
- Prepare the sweetbreads firstThe recipe begins at the boiling water, but lamb sweetbreads should be soaked in several changes of cold water for a few hours until they lose their pink blush. After the five-minute blanch, cool them, then pull away the outer membrane and any hard veins — that is what "neatly trim" means. Many cooks also press them between two plates under a weight for an hour to firm the texture.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so a half gill of white wine is 1/4 cup and one and a half gills of tomato sauce is 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon; a full 1/4 teaspoon of cayenne in this quantity is assertive but not out of line.
- Sautoir and open fireA sautoir is a straight-sided sauté pan, wide enough that the sweetbreads sit in one layer. "Open fire" here means direct high heat on the range top, not live coals — you want browning in those eight minutes, so do not crowd the pan.
- Extract of beefThis is concentrated meat glaze — commercial Bovril-type extract or a spoonful of homemade glace de viande. Half a teaspoon is a seasoning, not a stock substitute; use a dark demi-glace or reduced beef stock reduced to syrup if you have it.
- Corner of the rangeThe final butter goes in off direct heat, at a temperature where the sauce is hot but not simmering. This is monter au beurre: add the half ounce in small pieces, swirling constantly, so the butter emulsifies rather than splitting into oil.
- The paper boxesThese are caisses, oval cases folded from stiff parchment or baking paper. The recipe butters the outside and dries them in the oven for five minutes, presumably to stiffen them before filling. Small ovenproof ramekins or scallop shells serve the same purpose.
- Truffle and canned mushrooms"Truffie" is a printer's error for truffle. Canned mushrooms were the standard of the period and are already cooked; fresh cremini sliced thin will need a couple of minutes longer in the pan to give up their water.
- YieldSix boxes from a pound and a half of sweetbreads makes six first-course portions, not six dinners. As a main course it serves three.
This appears to come from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book, and it carries the fingerprints of the Delmonico's kitchen where Filippini spent much of his career: a garnish of truffle and mushroom, a two-stage reduction of brandy, port and white wine, a butter-mounted finish, and service in paper cases on a folded napkin. The surname attached to the title follows a long restaurant habit of naming a dish for the patron who ordered it, the guest it was invented for, or occasionally the cook who devised it — Delmonico's alone generated dozens of such names, most of which have lost their referents entirely. Lamb sweetbreads — either the thymus of the throat or the pancreas, and the recipe does not say which — were considered a delicacy well above ordinary offal in this period and appeared regularly on American hotel and club menus; their near-disappearance from home cooking has more to do with twentieth-century squeamishness about glands than with any change in the meat itself.