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Sweetbreads, Perigneux
Have six fine, blanched heart sweetbreads ready. Finely slice half a carrot, half an onion, one branch celery, one branch parsley and place the vegetables in a frying pan with one bay leaf, one clove and any trimmings of lard on hand. Lay the breads over the vegetables. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Spread a tablespoon melted butter over the breads and cook on the fire for five minutes. Moisten with a half gill white wine, one gill white broth and one gill demi-glace. Cover the breads with a lightly buttered paper and set in the oven for thirty-five minutes. Remove, dress the breads on a large hot dish and keep hot. Skim the fat from the gravy, boil on the range for ten minutes, then strain into another saucepan; add one finely chopped truffle and two tablespoons sherry, boil for five minutes longer, then pour the sauce over the breads and serve.
A classic braise in a covered pan, finished with a truffled sherry sauce. The recipe assumes you arrive with the sweetbreads already soaked, blanched and pressed, which is most of the actual work.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. So half a gill of white wine is 1/4 cup, and a gill each of broth and demi-glace is 1/2 cup each — about 1 1/4 cups of liquid for six sweetbreads, which is a shallow braise, not a submersion.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Thirty-five minutes under paper suits 325-350F; the liquid should tremble, not boil, or the meat tightens and goes grainy.
- "Blanched heart sweetbreads"The heart or "nut" sweetbread is the pancreas, rounder and firmer than the elongated throat (thymus) sweetbread. Blanched here means the standard preparation the book takes for granted: soak several hours in several changes of cold water until pale, bring gently to a simmer for a few minutes, plunge into ice water, then peel off the outer membrane and press flat between two plates with a weight until cold.
- The hingePressing matters: sweetbreads braised without being weighted and chilled first are more likely to swell and shed liquid into the sauce.
- Trimmings of lardProbably scraps of fresh pork fat or fatback rather than rendered lard from a tub. A few slices of unsmoked bacon or salt pork rind would do the same job, which is to enrich the bed of vegetables underneath.
- Buttered paperA cartouche — parchment cut to the width of the pan, buttered side down, pressed onto the meat. It bastes the tops and stops them drying without steaming them as a tight lid would.
- Demi-glaceA reduced brown veal stock. Good commercial demi-glace concentrate is a fair substitute; a thin canned broth is not, since the sauce here is never thickened and relies entirely on the demi-glace for body.
- Truffle and sherryThe recipe calls for one finely chopped truffle, which in a Perigueux-style sauce would normally be black, and it is the point of the dish. If you have none, truffle paste stirred in off the heat carries more than truffle oil does. A dry sherry suits the sauce better than a cream sherry, which will make it cloying.
- YieldSix sweetbreads serve six as a course on their own, with rice, buttered peas or a puff-pastry case to catch the sauce.
The title is presumably a misspelling of Perigueux, the town in the Dordogne at the centre of the French black truffle trade; in classic kitchen usage a sauce Perigueux is a demi-glace finished with chopped truffle and often Madeira or sherry, and the name on a menu was understood as a promise of truffle rather than a regional dish. Sweetbreads were common restaurant fare, delicate, expensive, and requiring the long soaking, blanching and pressing that a professional kitchen could do in advance. The combination belongs to the French restaurant repertoire of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.