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Patties of Lamb Sweetbreads
Plunge one and a half pounds fresh lamb sweetbreads into two quarts boiling water with a teaspoon salt for five minutes. Remove, drain and neatly trim, then cut them in half. Heat two tablespoons melted lard in a frying pan, drop in the breads, season with a half teaspoon each salt and pepper, then briskly brown for fifteen minutes, drain and keep warm. Mix in a saucepan one and a half tablespoons melted butter with three tablespoons flour, pour in three-quarters pint broth, mix well and let boil for fifteen minutes, then add the sweet-breads. Season with two saltspoons salt, a saltspoon each cayenne and grated nutmeg, mix well and let cook for five minutes. Dilute an egg yolk with half gill cream, add to the breads, and mix with a spoon while heating for one minute. Arrange six patties on a large dish and divide the preparation into them, place the covers on and serve.
A vol-au-vent filling in the classic French manner, written for cooks who bought sweetbreads by the pound. The instructions are sound; the vocabulary and one or two timings need translating.
- "Patties" means pastry casesThese are baked puff-pastry shells with lids — what a French kitchen calls bouchées or vol-au-vent — not meat patties. Frozen puff pastry shells work, or buy six vol-au-vent cases from a bakery.
- Small measuresA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the seasoning at that stage is half a teaspoon salt plus a quarter teaspoon each of cayenne and nutmeg. A gill is half a cup, so half a gill of cream is four tablespoons. Three-quarters of a pint of broth is 1½ cups.
- Soak and peel firstThe recipe assumes butcher-fresh sweetbreads. Soak them in several changes of cold water for a few hours to draw out blood before the five-minute blanch, and after blanching pull away the outer membrane and any gristle while they are still warm — "neatly trim" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
- The browning is too longFifteen minutes of brisk frying will dry out already-blanched sweetbreads. Four or five minutes a side over medium-high heat, until the surface is deep gold, gives the same colour with the interior still creamy.
- LardTwo tablespoons of lard browns beautifully and is worth using if you have it; clarified butter or a neutral oil with a knob of butter behaves the same way.
- The hinge: the egg liaisonOnce the yolk and cream go in, the sauce must not simmer. Take the pan off direct heat, stir the diluted yolk in, and warm it for no more than a minute — a boil will curdle the yolk and leave the sauce grainy.
- Sauce thicknessFifteen minutes at a boil is there to cook out the flour and reduce the velouté to coating consistency. Keep it at a lazy simmer and stir the bottom of the pan, and thin with a little more broth if it tightens past the point where it will still flow into the shells.
- YieldSix filled cases; a first course for six, or a lunch for three with a salad.
Sweetbreads — the thymus and pancreas of a young animal, nothing to do with bread or sugar — were prized offal in the era this book comes from, often commanding high prices and appearing on hotel and club dinner menus. Filling puff-pastry shells with a creamed, nutmeg-scented ragoût of them belongs to the French repertoire that dominated professional cooking in Europe and America around 1900, where a vol-au-vent à la financière or à la reine could appear as a light course between fish and roast. The name is generally traced to "sweet" for the mild taste and an old sense of "bread" or "brede" meaning flesh, though the derivation is not certain. That a reader could be assumed to know what to do with a pound and a half of fresh lamb sweetbreads says a good deal about how much narrower the American butcher's counter has since become.