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Sweetbread Cutlets, Sauce Perigueux
Soak six sweetbreads in cold water two hours. Remove and plunge in boiling water five minutes. Drain, then trim all around, place in a saucepan with a sliced carrot, one small sliced onion cut in small pieces, half ounce lard, half gill white wine and one pint broth. Season with a light teaspoon salt, cover pan, slowly boil twenty minutes. Lift up breads with a skimmer, cut into quarter-inch-square pieces and keep on a plate till required. Mix in a saucepan one and a half ounces butter with two ounces flour. Skim fat from surface of sweetbread broth, then strain through a Chinese strainer into the roux, mix well and let reduce to half the quantity, frequently mixing meanwhile; add six finely chopped canned mushrooms, half teaspoon chopped truffles, one saltspoon cayenne, half saltspoon grated nutmeg, two tablespoons sherry, three tablespoons cream and two egg yolks. Sharply mix with whisk while cooking two minutes. Add the breads, gently mix, cook two minutes, transfer to a dish and let cool off. Roll out the force on a lightly floured table to six nice cutlet forms, dip in beaten egg, then roll in bread crumbs; arrange in a frying basket, plunge in boiling fat and fry eight minutes. Remove, drain on a cloth, dress on a dish, one overlapping another, crown like. Pour a sauce perigueux around them, adjust a fancy frill at the end of each cutlet and serve
This is a croquette dressed up as a chop: cooked sweetbreads bound in a thick, egg-enriched velouté, chilled, shaped, crumbed and deep-fried. Most of the work is in the binding and the chilling, not the frying.
- The hinge: chill it hard"Let cool off" is doing far too much work. Spread the mixture no more than an inch deep in a tray and refrigerate until thoroughly cold and firm, at least three hours or overnight. Warm forcemeat will not hold a cutlet shape and will burst in the fat.
- "The force"Filippini means the forcemeat, i.e. the bound sweetbread mixture from the previous step. Divide it into six equal portions and pat each into a flattened teardrop with a slight point for the frill.
- Old measuresA gill is 4 fl oz, half a cup, so half a gill of wine is a quarter cup, 4 tablespoons. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Butter and flour are given by weight: 1½ oz butter is 3 tablespoons, 2 oz flour is a scant half cup — deliberately a very stiff roux, since it has to set the mixture solid.
- 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 gristle before the broth meets the roux.
- SweetbreadsVeal sweetbreads are the ones intended here, and they need ordering from a butcher; the name covers both the throat (thymus) and the heart sweetbread. Six will amount to several pounds. The two-hour soak in cold water draws out blood and whitens them; the five-minute blanch firms them enough to peel away the membrane.
- The yolksOnce the egg yolks and cream go in, the sauce must not boil or it will curdle and break the bind. Two minutes of brisk whisking over moderate heat is right, and no more.
- Frying timeEight minutes is far longer than needed — everything inside is already cooked. Fry at 350-360F for 3 to 4 minutes, until the crumb is deep gold and the centre is hot. Longer than that and the interior liquefies and finds a way out.
- Sauce PérigueuxA demi-glace or brown sauce finished with Madeira and chopped truffle, named for Périgueux in the Périgord. Filippini presumably treats it among his sauces; a modern reduced veal stock with Madeira and a little truffle or truffle paste stands in.
- Yield and frillsSix cutlets, so six servings as a first course or four as a main with a green vegetable. The "fancy frill" is the paper cutlet frill, a purely decorative crimped cuff, and nothing is lost by skipping it.
Sweetbreads were a luxury of the late nineteenth-century restaurant kitchen rather than an oddity, and this dish shows the era's fondness for reshaping one thing into the likeness of another: a bound croquette forced into the outline of a chop, given a paper frill where the bone would be, and stacked "crown like" on the platter. The technique is straight French professional practice — braise in a light stock with aromatics, thicken the strained cooking liquid into a very stiff velouté, use it as the binder, chill, crumb, fry — and it is the same logic behind cromesquis and croquettes de volaille. Alexander Filippini, whose name is attached to this book, spent much of his career in the Delmonico's orbit in New York, and the truffle-and-Madeira sauce Périgueux, the canned mushrooms and the cutlet frills all belong to that world of grand-hotel cooking translated for American households with servants. Offal of this kind fell out of general American use across the twentieth century, which is why sweetbreads now require a special order while calf's liver still does not.