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Sweetbreads En Casserole
Blanch and trim six heart sweetbreads. Place in an earthen casserole dish with twelve very small green white onions around the breads. Season with teaspoon salt and three saltspoons white pepper, spread one tablespoon melted butter over all. Set in oven to braise forty minutes, turning and basting once in a while. Remove, drain off a little of the butter then pour in a gill white wine and let reduce to half the quantity. Arrange a cooked potato noisette around the sweetbreads. Squeeze juice of half a sound lemon over and serve in same casserole.
A straightforward braise whose success rests almost entirely on the preparation of the sweetbreads before they ever reach the dish. The original assumes a cook who knows what "blanch and trim" involves and gives no oven temperature.
- Heart sweetbreadsThe plump, rounded gland (the pancreas), as distinct from the elongated "throat" sweetbread, which is the thymus. Butchers now generally sell them simply as sweetbreads; ask for the heart or nut end. Six, as here, are intended to serve six.
- Blanch and trim, in fullSoak in several changes of cold water for a few hours until they pale, then bring slowly to a simmer in fresh water for a couple of minutes, drain, and plunge into ice water. Only then can the outer membrane and any gristle be peeled away. Pressing the blanched sweetbreads between two plates under a weight for an hour firms them and keeps them from swelling in the oven.
- Oven heatNone is given. A braise of this kind suggests a moderate oven, roughly 325-350F, so the butter does not brown and the sweetbreads stay moist; the original's turning and basting implies fairly open access to the dish. Forty minutes should suit whole heart sweetbreads at that heat; they should be firm and opaque throughout.
- A gill4 fl oz (half a cup) in American measure, 5 fl oz if the imperial gill is meant. Reduced by half it leaves only a couple of fluid ounces of pan sauce for six -- enough to gloss the meat, not to pool.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three amounts to three-quarters of a teaspoon of white pepper. That is a substantial amount by modern palates; start with half and adjust.
- Green white onionsSpring onions with a rounded bulb, or the smallest young onions you can find, trimmed to an inch or two of green. Pearl onions are the nearest year-round substitute.
- The earthen casseroleHere the word means the pot, and the dish goes to table in it. Earthenware is vulnerable to direct heat and to sharp temperature change, so it is safer to make the wine reduction in a small saucepan and pour it back than to set the pot over a burner. Any lidded braiser works if you have no earthenware.
- Potato noisettePotato scooped into hazelnut-sized balls with a small melon baller and cooked in butter until golden. They are a garnish arranged around the meat at the end, not braised with it.
Sweetbreads sat near the top of the meat hierarchy in the restaurant cooking of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — expensive, delicate, and taken as a test of a cook's touch, since they must be soaked, blanched, peeled and pressed before any actual cooking begins. The style here is unmistakably French-hotel: butter, a splash of white wine reduced to a glaze, small glazed onions, potatoes turned into noisettes, and lemon squeezed over at the last moment. Recipes of this sort travelled into American household books through the chefs who compiled them, appearing alongside the ordinary measures of the period — a gill, a saltspoon — and a casserole meaning the vessel rather than the meal. Serving in the cooking pot was itself part of the fashion, the earthenware arriving at table still hot and doing the work of a serving dish.