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Sweetbreads, Espagnole
Soak six fresh heart sweetbreads in cold water two hours, plunge in boiling water five minutes. Remove and drop in cold water to thoroughly cool off, remove and neatly trim. Place in a sautoire half a sliced carrot one sliced onion and one ounce larding pork, cut in small pieces. Lay the breads on top. Season with half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper. Lightly baste surface of breads with very little melted butter. Moisten with two gills broth, then let reduce on fire until nearly dry. Pour in two gills demi-glace. Cover with buttered paper, set in oven thirty-five minutes. Remove, arrange six freshly prepared round pieces of toast, two inches in diameter, on a hot dish; place breads on top of the toast. Skim fat from surface of sauce, strain sauce over the breads and serve.
A straightforward brown braise, but the original assumes you know how sweetbreads are handled and that a stock pot of demi-glace is standing by. Both need translating.
- The hinge: soak, blanch, chill, pressThe hinge: soak, blanch, chill, trim -- The two-hour cold soak draws out blood, the five-minute boil firms the flesh so it can be trimmed, and the cold plunge stops it cooking further. Skip or rush any of these and the membrane will not peel cleanly and the finished breads will be grey and soft rather than pale and firm. A further step the book omits, common in classical practice, is to press the blanched breads between two plates under a light weight for an hour so they hold their shape in the braise.
- "Heart" sweetbreadsOld butchery split the offal into the round, plump heart or kernel sweetbread (the pancreas) and the longer, more irregular throat sweetbread (the thymus). The heart bread was the prized one. A modern butcher will simply call them veal sweetbreads; ask for the round lobes. Six of them will run somewhere in the region of 2 to 3 lb, depending on size.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of broth is 1 cup, and two gills of demi-glace another cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making three saltspoons three-quarters of a teaspoon of pepper for six portions, which is assertive but not a misprint.
- SautoireA straight-sided sauté pan, wide and shallow, ovenproof. Choose one that holds the six breads in a single layer with a little room; crowded, they steam instead of glazing.
- Larding porkUnsmoked fatback or salt pork. If using salt pork, blanch the dice briefly and cut back the added salt, since the sauce reduces further in the oven.
- Demi-glaceEspagnole reduced with brown stock until it coats a spoon. Commercial concentrates work; a cup of well-reduced veal stock, lightly thickened, does the same job. Do not substitute a thin broth, as the sauce is meant to nap the breads at the end.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A braise of this kind sits comfortably at 325 to 350F. Thirty-five minutes under buttered paper at that heat is right; hotter and the sauce catches around the edge of the pan.
- Buttered paperA cartouche of parchment cut to the pan, buttered side down, resting on the food. It keeps the exposed tops moist while letting the sauce reduce, which a tight lid will not do.
- YieldSix servings, one sweetbread on one round of toast each, as a first course or light entrée.
Sauce espagnole is one of the grand sauces codified in nineteenth-century French kitchens and generally traced to Carême, who set it among the mothers from which the rest descend: a brown roux, brown stock, and mirepoix, cooked long and skimmed often, then reduced further with more stock into demi-glace. Naming a dish "espagnole" in a book like this signals the sauce rather than any Spanish origin, and the vague Spanish attribution of the name has never been settled. Sweetbreads were expensive, delicate, and highly regarded in this period, which is why they get the full restaurant treatment here: braised on a bed of aromatics, glazed under paper, and set on trimmed rounds of toast to catch the sauce. Alexander Filippini, who compiled The International Cook Book (1906), had cooked at Delmonico's in New York, and the method reads exactly as it would have been written on a professional service card, with the demi-glace simply assumed to be on hand.