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Sweetbreads, Schwerin
Blanch and pare six heart sweetbreads. Finely slice a medium carrot, an onion, ounce salt pork and two branches parsley, place in a sautoire with a tablespoon melted butter and lay sweetbreads on top. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, set on the range and cook for five minutes. Moisten with a gill white wine, two gills broth, cover with a buttered paper, briskly boil for ten minutes, then set them in oven for twenty minutes. Bring to oven door, pour in two tablespoons sherry, baste well with gravy and reset in oven without paper for ten minutes more, remove, lift up and place in a cocotte dish.
Mix in a small saucepan half an ounce each butter and flour, strain sweetbreads gravy through cheesecloth in, skim fat off surface, sharply mix until it comes to a boil, add a small truffle cut in small squares, lightly mix and cook on fire for five minutes. Mix on a plate an egg yolk with a half gill cream and add to sauce, sharply mixing while adding, pour sauce over breads, set in oven for ten minutes, remove and serve.
Filippini's method is a braise finished with an egg-yolk liaison, and the liaison is where it can go wrong. Everything else is straightforward once the old vessels and measures are translated.
- The hinge: the finishing sauceOnce the yolk and cream go in, the sauce must not boil or it will curdle into grains. Temper the yolk with a little hot sauce first, add it off the heat, and use the final ten minutes in the oven only to warm through — the dish should never bubble again.
- Gills and ouncesA gill is half a cup, so the braising liquid is 1/2 cup white wine and 1 cup broth, and the enrichment is 1/4 cup cream. Half an ounce each of butter and flour is about 1 tablespoon butter and 2 tablespoons flour — a small roux for roughly a cup and a half of strained liquid.
- Sautoire and cocotteA sautoire is a shallow straight-sided sauté pan; any wide ovenproof pan with a lid does the job. The cocotte here is the serving vessel — a shallow ovenproof casserole the sweetbreads sit in for the final glazing.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven is the usual modern reading for the covered braising stage; since the uncovered ten minutes are meant to glaze, a somewhat hotter oven is often used for that, but neither figure comes from Filippini.
- Heart sweetbreadsThe heart sweetbread is the plump, rounded piece and the prized one; the throat sweetbread is the longer, stringier piece. (Which gland is which is not consistently reported: English butchery generally calls the rounded one the pancreas, while French usage treats both as parts of the thymus.) Order them from a butcher, allow one per person, and buy them as fresh as possible.
- Blanch and pareThis means soak in several changes of cold water until they run clear, then bring gently to a simmer for a few minutes, cool, and peel away the membrane and any gristle. Pressing them flat under a weighted plate while they cool gives the firm texture the braise depends on.
- Buttered paperA cartouche — parchment cut to the pan and buttered on the underside. It keeps the tops moist and pale rather than browning them, which is the point of the pale, ivory-coloured finish here.
- Total cooking timeForty minutes in the oven after a boil is long by modern standards. Blanched, pressed sweetbreads are cooked through in about 25 minutes of gentle braising; go the full distance and they turn soft and grainy rather than yielding.
- The truffleA fresh black truffle is a serious expense for a garnish. Preserved truffle in the jar, or a small quantity of finely diced sautéed mushroom with a few drops of truffle oil added off the heat, keeps the sauce in character.
- YieldSix sweetbreads serve six as a first course or four as a main dish, with rice, buttered toast or plain boiled potatoes to take the sauce.
Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York as steward and manager as much as chef, compiled The International Cook Book (1906), and the geographical labels in it are mostly Delmonico's-style dedications rather than regional traditions: Schwerin is the old capital of Mecklenburg, and the name here signals a German-court association more than a German recipe. The dish itself is thoroughly French in construction, the method a white braise under buttered paper, the liquid strained and thickened, then finished with a yolk-and-cream liaison. Sweetbreads were standard restaurant luxury in this period, delicate enough to require the pale treatment and expensive enough to justify a truffle and a glass of sherry; the truffle in particular is the mark of a hotel kitchen writing for households that aspired to one. They fell out of American domestic cooking, it is often said, with the general retreat from offal after the Second World War, and now travel the other way, appearing on restaurant menus more often than home tables.