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Sweetbreads, Lafayette
Finely slice a small carrot, a small onion, one branch celery, one leek, one branch parsley and a branch chervil, and place in a frying pan with half ounce butter. Have six blanched and trimmed heart sweetbreads, lay them one beside another over the vegetables, and season with a teaspoon salt and a half teaspoon white pepper. Set on fire to brown for five minutes. Pour in one gill white wine and let reduce till nearly dry, then pour in two gills demi-glace. Cover breads with sheet buttered paper, then set in oven thirty-five minutes, remove, lift up breads and keep on a plate. Finely chop and keep separately four branches blanched parsley, the whites of two hard-boiled eggs, and three canned sweet red peppers. Then carefully distribute the chopped parsley over one-third the surface of each sweetbread, cover central part with chopped whites of the eggs, and finish by covering the other third of the surface with the chopped sweet peppers. Carefully place sweetbreads on a hot dish, strain sauce through a Chinese strainer into another saucepan, adding one finely chopped truffle, two tablespoons sherry, and lightly mix and boil for five minutes. Pour sauce around the breads, finely slice a small truffle and arrange it around base of the edge of dish and serve.
A Delmonico-style braise in which the sauce and the garnish do all the work, so the two things worth getting right are the sweetbread preparation and the demi-glace. Everything else is knife work.
- "Heart" sweetbreadsThe round, compact lobe (the noix), as opposed to the ragged, elongated throat sweetbread; cookery writers generally identify the heart sweetbread with the pancreas and the throat sweetbread with the thymus. Six will come to something in the region of 2 to 2 1/2 lb. Ask a butcher to order veal sweetbreads; they are often sold frozen.
- Blanched and trimmedThe book assumes you know this step: soak in several changes of cold water for a few hours until they pale, simmer 5 to 8 minutes in salted water, cool in ice water, then peel off the membrane and press between two plates under a weight until cold. Unpressed sweetbreads slump and will not hold the three bands of garnish.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. So 1/2 cup white wine and 1 cup demi-glace for six sweetbreads.
- Demi-glaceReal demi-glace, not gravy: reduced veal stock with a brown roux base, or a good commercial glace de viande let down with stock. Since it is already salty and reduces further with the sherry, hold back on the teaspoon of salt in the seasoning and correct at the end.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, 350F, for the 35 minutes; the liquid should barely bubble under the paper.
- Buttered paperA cartouche of buttered parchment cut to the pan and laid directly on the meat. It keeps the tops from drying while allowing slow reduction, which a tight lid would prevent.
- Canned sweet red peppersThese are pimientos, sold in jars; drain and blot them dry or they will bleed into the egg white. Roasted piquillo peppers work as well.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. Any fine sieve does the job; press the vegetables firmly to get the body out of them.
- TrufflesOne chopped truffle in the sauce and one sliced for the rim is period luxury. A teaspoon of good truffle paste in the finished sauce gets closer to the intent than cheap truffle oil, and the dish is not ruined by leaving it out.
- Yield and timingSix sweetbreads serve six as a first course, three or four as a main. Garnish and sauce at the last minute: the striped topping must go on hot sweetbreads and reach the table immediately.
The recipe is in the manner of Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, whose books catalogue the grand-hotel repertoire of the turn of the century in exactly this telegraphic style. Naming dishes for public figures was common practice in that kitchen, and Lafayette, the French officer who fought in the American Revolution, was a familiar emblem of Franco-American sentiment. Sweetbreads themselves were prestige food then in a way they are not now, appearing on menus alongside terrapin and canvasback duck.