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Sweetbreads En Coquilles
Plunge six heart sweetbreads in cold water for two hours; lift them up and drop them in boiling water for five minutes; remove, drain, trim well, and cut into thin slices. Heat in a frying pan a tablespoon melted butter, add the sliced breads and cook for ten minutes, tossing them well meanwhile. Remove from the fire and keep warm. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in a saucepan, mix in two tablespoons flour, add one gill milk, one gill cream and a half gill port wine. Season with a teaspoon salt, one saltspoon cayenne pepper and a saltspoon ground nutmeg; thoroughly mix, add the sweetbreads, lightly mix and cook gently for five minutes. Dilute two egg yolks with a tablespoon cream and gradually add to the rest, lightly mixing while cooking for two minutes more. Remove, then evenly divide the preparation into six well-cleaned "table shells." Sprinkle a tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese over them; place on a baking tin and bake in the oven for ten minutes. Remove, place on a hot dish and serve.
PUNCH, MENTH (MINT PUNCH) Prepare a lemon-water ice and just before serving add two tablespoons mint liquor. Mix well and serve in six sherbet glasses.
A Delmonico-style sweetbread gratin, baked and served in shells. The recipe assumes a cook who already knows how to handle offal, so it leaves out the temperatures and the one step that decides whether the sauce is silk or scrambled egg.
- The hinge: the yolk liaisonOnce the two yolks go in, the sauce must not reach a simmer. Keep it below about 180F and stir constantly for the two minutes given; a boil will curdle it into grains that the Parmesan crust will not hide.
- Heart sweetbreadsThe "heart" sweetbread is the plump, round pancreatic lobe, as opposed to the elongated throat (thymus) sweetbread. Six of them is a generous amount; the total weight depends on the size of the animal. Order ahead from a butcher, and use them within a day of purchase.
- Soaking and blanchingThe two-hour cold soak draws out blood; change the water once or twice. After the five-minute blanch, plunge them into ice water before trimming, which firms the flesh and makes the membrane peel away cleanly. Many cooks press them under a weighted plate for an hour at this stage for neater slices.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. So the sauce takes 1/2 cup milk, 1/2 cup cream and 1/4 cup port.
- A saltspoonA quarter teaspoon. A full quarter-teaspoon of cayenne is assertive by modern palates; start with half that and adjust.
- "Table shells"Natural or ceramic scallop shells, sold as coquilles and still available. Shallow 4 to 5 inch gratin dishes or ramekins do the same job. If using real shells, scrub and boil them before the first use.
- Oven temperatureNone is given because the filling is already cooked and only needs browning. Use 425F for the ten minutes, or run them under a broiler for two or three minutes and watch them.
- SaltA full teaspoon in this quantity of sauce, before the Parmesan goes on, will read as salty. Season lightly and correct at the end.
- YieldSix shells, intended as a lunch or supper entrée rather than a main course. Serve immediately; the sauce tightens as it cools.
- The trailing textEverything after "serve" belongs to a different page. It is the bill of fare for February 29th and a separate mint punch, which is simply lemon ice slackened with two tablespoons of crème de menthe and spooned into sherbet glasses.
Sweetbreads en coquille belong to the era when the thymus and pancreas of a calf were luxury restaurant goods rather than curiosities, served in the delicate, creamy, shell-borne preparations that French-trained American chefs favored for lunch and supper courses. The formula here is the standard one: blanch, trim, press, slice, bind in a cream sauce of butter, flour, milk and cream, then glaze under heat. Port and nutmeg with offal is a long-standing pairing, generally traced to the French kitchen's treatment of ris de veau. Alexander Filippini, who spent much of his career at Delmonico's in New York, worked in a calendar format, giving breakfast, luncheon and dinner menus for every day of the year, which is why a leap-day bill of fare has attached itself to the bottom of this page and why the dishes carry cross-reference numbers to recipes elsewhere in the volume.