Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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April 6
Menu: Broiled Soft Shell Crabs; Sweetbreads with Mushroom Puree; Boiled Bermuda Onions; New Green Peas; Lettuce and Radish Salad; Fried Cornstarch Pudding; Coffee; Sweetbreads with Mushroom Puree-; Blanch and prepare sweetbreads, by; cutting away all the windpipes and; fibrous nerves. When they are quite; cool, put under a weight to flatten; well. Dip them in melted Crisco; and broil, without browning too much,; over a clear fire.; cup cream and salt and pepper to; taste. Put lamb steak on hot platter,; garnish with mushroom caps, and; pour sauce around.
The text as printed here is defective: the mushroom pur he sauce instructions break off mid-sentence, and the plating line calls for lamb steak rather than sweetbreads, evidently pulled in from a neighbouring entry. What survives is a clear method for the sweetbreads themselves.
- Sweetbreads are not brainsDespite the warning attached above, sweetbreads are the thymus (throat bread) and pancreas (heart or belly bread) of a calf or lamb, not nervous tissue. Buy veal or lamb sweetbreads from a butcher who can tell you the source.
- Blanch and press, in that orderSoak in several changes of cold water until they run clear, then bring slowly to a simmer for three to five minutes, drop into ice water, and peel away the membrane, ducts and any fibrous threads. Only then press between two plates with a weight for an hour or more, chilled; the pressing is what gives an even slice that broils without falling apart.
- "A clear fire"This means live coals with no flame or smoke. A gas or electric broiler set high, with the rack about four inches from the element, is the equivalent. Four to five minutes a side is enough for a pressed sweetbread; the recipe asks only that they not brown too much.
- Crisco as the brushing fatThe book is a Procter and Gamble promotional volume, so hydrogenated shortening stands in wherever an older cook would have used butter or clarified butter. Melted butter brushed on before broiling browns better and tastes better; the substitution costs nothing.
- The missing puréeA mushroom purée of this period means mushrooms cooked down in butter, chopped or sieved, then bound with a little béchamel or cream and seasoned. The surviving fragment "cup cream and salt and pepper to taste" is the tail of that instruction; the quantity of mushrooms and any thickener are lost and cannot honestly be reconstructed from the text.
- GarnishMushroom caps for garnish should be trimmed flat, cooked in butter with a squeeze of lemon to keep them pale, and set around the platter. Grilled whole caps darken the plate but suit the dish just as well.
- YieldSweetbreads shrink considerably. Reckon on about 1 lb for four people as part of a full dinner, or two people as a main course.
The Story of Crisco (1913), written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter and Gamble, was an advertising cookbook dressed as a household manual: several hundred recipes in which the new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening replaces butter, lard and suet in turn. The "Calendar of Dinners" section supplied a menu for every day of the year, and sweetbreads turn up there because they were the reliable mark of a genteel table — mild, pale, expensive by weight, and considered suitable for invalids and ladies' luncheons alike. Their prestige has faded in Britain and America since the mid-century, largely through the general retreat from offal, though they remain standard in French and Italian restaurant cooking as ris de veau and animelle. The corruption of the text here — a lamb steak appearing in the plating line of a sweetbread recipe — is a reminder that these promotional volumes were assembled quickly and proofread lightly.