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Sweetbreads, Hongroise
Have six heart sweetbreads blanched. Place a mirepoix in a small frying pan with half ounce butter and place breads on top. Season with half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons paprika, place pan on fire five minutes, then moisten with three gills water and two tablespoons sherry, cover with a lightly buttered paper, set in oven forty minutes, remove, dress on a dish and keep hot. Mix in a small saucepan one tablespoon melted butter with two tablespoons flour, and heat for half minute; remove fat from sweetbreads gravy, strain into the roux, mix with wooden spoon until it comes to a boil, and let boil for fifteen minutes. Add three saltspoons paprika and half gill cream, mix well and let boil five minutes longer. Dilute an egg yolk in a tablespoon cream, add to sauce, mix lightly while heating for one minute, strain sauce over breads, arrange six timbales of rice around breads and serve.
A classic paprika braise dressed up with a yolk-thickened velouté. Nothing here is difficult, but the original assumes you know how to prep sweetbreads and leaves the oven temperature entirely to your judgment.
- The hinge: the yolk goes in off the boilOnce the egg yolk and cream are stirred in, the sauce must not simmer again or it will scramble and break. Take the pan off direct heat, stir the liaison in, and warm it for the stated minute only, just to the point where it coats a spoon.
- "Heart sweetbreads"The heart or "nut" sweetbread is the pancreatic gland, rounder and firmer than the elongated throat sweetbread; much of what is sold today as veal sweetbreads is in fact the throat (thymus) gland, so it is worth specifying. The six timbales of rice suggest six portions, one sweetbread each.
- Blanching means more than a quick dipSoak the sweetbreads in cold water two to three hours, changing it until it runs clear, then poach 5-8 minutes in acidulated water, cool, and peel away the outer membrane. Pressing them flat under a plate for an hour firms the texture before braising.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so three gills of water is 1 1/2 cups and half a gill of cream is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon; three saltspoons is roughly 3/4 teaspoon of paprika, used twice.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A covered braise of this kind wants a moderate oven, 325-350F, held at a bare simmer for the full forty minutes.
- Mirepoix and the buttered paperThe mirepoix is diced carrot, onion and celery; classical versions sometimes also include a little bacon or ham, though this recipe does not say. The buttered paper is a cartouche laid directly on the food; parchment does the job and keeps the sweetbreads from drying above the liquid line.
- Fifteen minutes of boiling the sauce is not a mistakeThe long simmer cooks the raw flour taste out of the roux and reduces the braising liquid to a glaze-like body. Add stock if it tightens too far before the cream goes in.
- Rice timbalesPack hot cooked rice into six buttered dariole moulds or ramekins, press lightly, and turn out around the platter. Any short-grain rice holds the shape better than long-grain.
Hongroise is simply French menu language for "Hungarian style," and in the classical repertoire it means one thing above all: paprika, usually with onion, cream and a little white wine. Sweet Hungarian paprika was codified into a small family of dishes -- chicken, veal, sweetbreads -- that reads as a restaurant translation of guly s and paprik s rather than as anything a Hungarian cook would recognize as home food. Its appearance in such a volume is characteristic of the era's cookbooks, which mapped the world through the Parisian brigade's vocabulary. The sweetbreads themselves signal the class of the book: glands are perishable, fiddly to clean, and were the mark of a kitchen with a good butcher and a cook with time.