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Sweetbreads, Alice
Soak six heart sweetbreads in cold water for two hours. Lift them up and plunge into two quarts boiling water with a teaspoon salt to blanch for five minutes. Lift up, drain well on a cloth, then neatly trim all around. Cut twenty-four very thin strips larding pork, and with a very small larding needle carefully lard the top of each sweetbread with four strips of the lard. Lay the breads in a sautoire, one beside another. Season with a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and a saltspoon of grated nutmeg, adding three-quarters of a pint cold cream and one pint very fresh milk. Cover the pan and boil on the range for ten minutes, then add twelve good-sized peeled and well-cleaned fresh mushroom heads and boil for fifteen minutes longer. Knead well half ounce butter with a teaspoon flour in a bowl and carefully add, little by little, to the breads; mix well with a wooden spoon while cooking for one minute, without breaking the breads. Remove the pan to the table. Have six small individual mushroom glass bells. Cut six round pieces bread to the diameter of the bottom of the bells; lightly toast them. Place each toast in a shirred-egg dish, then place a sweetbread on top of each toast, nicely arrange two heads of mushrooms on top of each sweetbread, then cover them with the glass bells. Divide the sauce of the breads evenly in the six dishes around the bells. Place on the range, and as soon as they come to a boil place in a moderate oven to bake for ten minutes. Remove from the oven, place on six plates and serve with the bells, that is, do not remove the bells till they are on the table.
A hotel dish of the Delmonico school, written for a brigade with larding needles and glass bells on hand. Nothing in it is difficult, but several of the props and terms have gone out of circulation.
- Heart sweetbreadsThe two sweetbreads of a calf are usually distinguished as the round, compact "heart" (or belly) sweetbread and the longer "throat" sweetbread; sources differ on which gland each name refers to (pancreas versus the lobes of the thymus). Ask a butcher for veal heart sweetbreads; six of them serve six as a first course.
- Soak, blanch, then peelThe two-hour cold soak draws blood and the five-minute blanch firms the meat so it can be handled. The step the text takes for granted is stripping the tough outer membrane and any gristle after blanching — that is what "neatly trim all around" means, and skipping it leaves a chewy skin no amount of simmering will soften.
- Press them coldWidely recommended in period cookbooks though not mentioned here: after blanching, lay the sweetbreads between cloths under a weighted plate until cold. They hold their shape when larded and cooked and slice far more cleanly.
- Larding pork and the needleLarding pork is fresh unsmoked back fat or fatback, cut into thin lardons. A larding needle is still made, but the same effect comes from cutting a shallow slit with a paring knife and tucking the strip in. Salt pork, blanched to draw the salt, will substitute.
- Saltspoons and pintsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so this calls for half a teaspoon of cayenne — assertive, and worth reducing if your cayenne is fresh. Three-quarters of a US pint of cream is 1 1/2 cups and a pint of milk is 2 cups; together with the sautoire (a straight-sided shallow pan with a lid) that is enough liquid to come well up the breads.
- Do not actually boilRead "boil on the range" as a steady bare simmer. Cream and milk at a true rolling boil will break and catch on the pan bottom, and the sweetbreads toughen. Twenty-five minutes of gentle poaching is right for pieces this size.
- Peeled mushroomsPeeling the caps was the routine instruction of the period but is unnecessary with today's cultivated mushrooms. Wipe them, trim the stems flush, and add them for the last fifteen minutes so they give up liquid into the sauce.
- The kneaded butterHalf an ounce of butter worked with a teaspoon of flour is a beurre manié. Add it in small pieces off the boil, swirl rather than stir so the breads stay whole, and give it a minute of heat to lose the raw flour taste. It is a light bind, not a thick sauce.
- Bells, dishes, oven"Under glass" gear turns up in antique shops but is not needed: shallow individual gratin dishes work, and a warmed inverted glass tumbler or small dome can stand in for theatre. A moderate oven is usually reckoned at around 350F, and the ten minutes there is to set and glaze, not to cook further.
This is generally traced to Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book, written out of a career in New York's grand restaurant kitchens, and it belongs to a whole family of turn-of-the-century American hotel dishes served sous cloche — under a glass bell that trapped the steam and aroma until the waiter lifted it at the table. Sweetbreads were then a luxury of the same rank as terrapin or canvasback duck, appearing on menus larded, braised, creamed and glazed in dozens of variations, each given a woman's name or a patron's name to distinguish it on a printed carte; who Alice was is not recorded. The dish also shows the period's fondness for building a plate upward from a round of toast, a construction inherited from French garnishing practice and repeated across the era's American cookbooks. Offal of this kind fell out of everyday American fashion after mid-century, which is why a recipe that once needed no explanation now needs a paragraph of it.