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Sweetbreads Braise, Macedoine
Soak six heart sweetbreads in water for two hours. Remove and plunge in two quarts boiling water with a teaspoon salt for five minutes. Drain on a sieve and neatly trim them. Place in a sauteuse one finely sliced medium carrot and small onion, one ounce larding pork cut in small pieces, and place the breads on top. Season with half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper, adding tablespoon melted butter, place on the fire and cook five minutes. Moisten with three-fourths of a pint of broth and briskly boil five minutes, then set them in the oven thirty minutes. Remove, arrange six round pieces freshly prepared toasts two inches in diameter on a hot dish. Place the breads on top, neatly arranged crown-like. Dress a macedoine, prepared in the centre. Skim fat from surface of the gravy, then let reduce on open fire eight minutes, strain it through a Chinese strainer over the breads and serve.
A classic braise: blanch, trim, cook on a bed of aromatics, then reduce the braising liquid into a glaze. The whole dish stands or falls on the trimming and the reduction.
- "Heart" sweetbreadsThe heart or kernel sweetbread is the rounded lower lobe of the veal thymus, as opposed to the elongated throat sweetbread. Six of them means roughly 1½ to 2 lb; order ahead from a butcher, since they are rarely in a supermarket case.
- Soak, blanch, then pressThe two-hour cold soak draws out blood and is worth doing with a change or two of water. After the five-minute blanch, cool the sweetbreads, peel away the outer membrane and any tubes, then press them flat between two plates with a weight for an hour if you have the time — it firms the texture and keeps them from swelling apart in the braise.
- SauteuseA shallow, straight- or sloping-sided sauté pan with a lid, wide enough to hold the sweetbreads in one layer. Any lidded braiser or ovenproof skillet does the job.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A gentle braise is what is wanted: 325–350°F, covered, for the thirty minutes. The liquid should barely tremble.
- Small measuresA saltspoon is about ¼ teaspoon, so three of them is a generous ¾ teaspoon of pepper — season to your own taste rather than by the letter. Three-fourths of a pint of broth is 1½ cups.
- Larding porkUnsmoked fatback or salt pork; if using salt pork, blanch the dice briefly and cut back on the added salt. Slab bacon works but brings smoke the dish does not ask for.
- MacedoineA mixture of vegetables cut in even small dice — traditionally carrot, turnip, green beans and peas — cooked separately and bound with a little butter. It goes in the middle of the ring of sweetbreads, not into the braise.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the cone-shaped fine-mesh strainer. A fine sieve lined with a doubled square of cheesecloth gives the same clarity.
- The reductionSkim thoroughly, then reduce hard until the liquid coats a spoon — eight minutes is a guide, not a rule, and depends on your pan. This is the only sauce in the dish, so under-reducing leaves the toast soggy and the plate thin.
- YieldSix servings, one sweetbread on one round of toast each, as a first course or light main.
Sweetbreads were standard restaurant and household fare in the early twentieth century, when nose-to-tail eating needed no defence and offal was priced as a delicacy rather than an oddity. The method here follows the French repertoire that shaped American hotel cooking: blanch and press, braise on a bed of carrot, onion and pork fat, then finish with the reduced braising liquid — the pattern of the French ris de veau braisé. The macédoine of diced vegetables in the centre is generally said to take its name from Macedonia and its mixture of peoples, a culinary pun on a mixed assembly. That this appears in a book called The International Cook Book says something about the period's assumptions: for an American cook of 1906, the international style of cooking was, largely, French.