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Sweetbreads, Braise, Montebello
Plunge and keep in cold water six very fresh heart sweetbreads for two hours. Drain them, plunge in two quarts boiling water with a teaspoon salt for six minutes, drain again and nicely trim all around. Place in a small frying pan a teaspoon melted butter, half a sliced carrot, half a sliced onion, one sliced leek, a branch sliced celery, one branch parsley and a few parings larding pork. Lay the breads over the vegetables. Season with a half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper, and cook on the fire for six minutes. Moisten with a gill and a half broth and half gill demi-glace. Cover with a buttered paper and place in a brisk oven for thirty minutes. Remove, dress the breads on six freshly prepared round toasts, pour a hot Montebello sauce over the breads and serve. (Place all the contents of the pan into the demi-glace pan.)
A classic French braise written in Delmonico's shorthand: the cook is assumed to know what a demi-glace pan is and to have one going. The essentials translate cleanly if you handle the sweetbreads properly at the start.
- The hinge: soak, blanch, pressThe two-hour cold soak draws out blood and is not optional if you want pale, sweet meat; change the water once or twice. After the six-minute blanch, plunge into ice water, then peel away the outer membrane and any tubes while the breads are cold and firm. Many cooks also press them between two plates under a light weight for an hour so they hold shape in the braise.
- "Heart" sweetbreadsNot the heart. The term is usually taken to mean the round, compact lobe (the noix), as against the ragged throat sweetbread, though period usage is not wholly consistent. Ask a butcher for veal heart sweetbreads or noix; six will run to roughly 2 to 2.5 lb, and they will usually need ordering.
- GillA gill is half a cup. So a gill and a half of broth is 3/4 cup, and half a gill of demi-glace is 1/4 cup. That is a shallow braising liquid by design; the breads should not be submerged.
- Brisk ovenA hot oven, roughly 400-425F. With the pan covered by a buttered paper rather than a lid, thirty minutes at that heat should reduce the liquid well down while the tops color.
- Buttered paperA cartouche: parchment cut to the pan's diameter, buttered side down on the food. It bastes the surface and lets steam escape so the liquid concentrates, which a tight lid will not do.
- Larding porkThe trimmings from a slab of fresh pork fatback used for larding. Unsmoked salt pork, rinsed, or a scrap of fatback or pancetta gives the same result; smoked bacon will overwhelm the dish.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock, not a pan sauce. Good commercial demi-glace or a well-reduced veal stock works; the parenthetical instruction means the braising vegetables and juices go back into the sauce base to be strained and reduced with it.
- Montebello sauceA period compound sauce built on the demi-glace, presumably given under sauces elsewhere in the book. If you cannot find that entry, finish the strained braising liquid with butter and use it as it stands rather than guessing.
- Yield and serviceSix servings, one sweetbread on one round of toast each. Fry or griddle the toasts in butter just before plating; untoasted bread collapses under the sauce.
The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this recipe is written in exactly the idiom of a big brigade kitchen around 1900: a demi-glace pot always simmering, larding pork trimmings always at hand, and garnishes named for people and places rather than described. Montebello is one of those names, generally traced to the Napoleonic dukedom held by Marshal Lannes and revived by the 1859 battle in Lombardy, a habit of naming French dishes after military honors that also gave us Marengo and Solferino. Sweetbreads themselves were among the most prized items on an American hotel menu of the period, expensive, delicate, and needing precisely the sort of soaking, blanching and gentle braising that a house with a full kitchen staff could give them. The dish tells you what the era considered luxury: not a rare ingredient so much as an ordinary one subjected to four separate operations before it reached the plate.