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May 19
Menu: Grape Fruit; Cream of Celery Soup; Sweetbreads; Creamed New Potatoes; Fruits; Molded Spinach; Green Peas; New Potatoes; Corn Salad; Cheese Sticks; Frozen Souffle; Coffee; Spanish *Spanish Omelet-1 green pepper, 1; red pepper, 1 onion, 3; tablespoons; Crisco, 6 mushrooms, 6 eggs, 6 table-; spoons water, salt and pepper to; taste.; Put 1/2 Crisco in saucepan, add; onion chopped very fine, mushrooms; and red and green pepper; cover,; cook slowly for 20 minutes. Make; plain omelet from rest of ingredi-; ents; turn this out on heated dish,; fill ends of dish or platter with; Spanish sauce, and send it to table.; Hot Biscuit; Fruit Salad; Carrots; Orange Ice; Sunshine Cake; Coffee Sweetbreads-Clean and soak 2 pairs of sweetbreads in cold water for an hour or more, then put them in pan with enough water to cover them, and cook them for 20 minutes. Take them out and place them in cold water for 2 or 3 minutes to make them firm. Dry thoroughly, rub them with tablespoon of Crisco. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and place in a pan with brown sauce. Cook in hot oven for 20 minutes. Baste often with the sauce.
A two-stage method — blanch, firm, then roast in sauce — that is still the standard way sweetbreads are handled. The original assumes you know what brown sauce is and that your butcher keeps sweetbreads on hand.
- The hinge: blanch, then chillThe 20-minute simmer and the plunge into cold water are not optional steps. They set the proteins so the sweetbreads can be trimmed and handled without falling apart, and they let you peel away the outer membrane and any tubes, which the recipe does not mention but which should come off after blanching.
- Soaking is for blood, not flavourAn hour in cold water draws out blood and leaves the sweetbreads pale; several changes of water, or a few hours in the refrigerator, does it better. Untrimmed sweetbreads from a modern butcher usually need this more than the recipe implies.
- CriscoPlain vegetable shortening, launched in 1911; this book exists to sell it. A tablespoon of butter or a neutral oil rubbed over the surface does the same job of helping the exterior colour in the oven.
- "Hot oven"Roughly 400-450F in the vocabulary of this period; the book gives no thermometer figure. Twenty minutes at that heat with frequent basting will glaze the surface without drying the interior, since the sweetbreads are already cooked through from the simmer.
- Brown sauceIn 1913 this means a flour-and-fat roux cooked to a nut colour and let down with brown stock — an espagnole or a simplified version of it. The recipe gives no quantity; you need enough to sit in the pan and baste with. A well-reduced veal or beef stock thickened lightly gives the same result with less flour.
- Two pairsVeal sweetbreads run roughly 3/4 to 1 lb per pair, so this serves four as a main course, six as a first course. Sweetbreads are almost always a special order; ask the butcher in advance and use them within a day.
- Which gland"A pair" traditionally means the throat sweetbread (the thymus) and the heart or belly sweetbread (the pancreas) from the same animal. The heart sweetbread is the plump, even-textured one and is generally reckoned the better piece; the throat sweetbread is more irregular in shape.
- The date line"May 20" places this in the book's Calendar of Dinners, where each recipe belongs to a numbered day's menu rather than standing alone. Nothing about the dish is seasonal.
Sweetbreads — the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb — were a fixture of respectable American and English dinner tables from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1930s, priced as a delicacy and served creamed, larded, broiled or, as here, roasted in a brown sauce. The name has nothing to do with bread or sugar; its origin is not documented with any certainty, though it is generally traced to an old sense of "bread" for a piece of roast meat, with "sweet" distinguishing it from the stronger-tasting offal. Their presence in The Story of Crisco is instructive: the book was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to persuade cooks that a new hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter and lard everywhere in the kitchen, so its author, Marion Harris Neil, worked Crisco into the whole social range of the period's cooking — from plain biscuit to a company dish like this one. The tablespoon of shortening rubbed over the blanched glands is doing very little culinary work; it is doing a great deal of advertising.
A two-stage method — blanch, firm, then roast in sauce — that is still the standard way sweetbreads are handled. The original assumes you know what brown sauce is and that your butcher keeps sweetbreads on hand.
- The hinge: blanch, then chillThe 20-minute simmer and the plunge into cold water are not optional steps. They set the proteins so the sweetbreads can be trimmed and handled without falling apart, and they let you peel away the outer membrane and any tubes, which the recipe does not mention but which should come off after blanching.
- Soaking is for blood, not flavourAn hour in cold water draws out blood and leaves the sweetbreads pale; several changes of water, or a few hours in the refrigerator, does it better. Untrimmed sweetbreads from a modern butcher usually need this more than the recipe implies.
- CriscoPlain vegetable shortening, launched in 1911; this book exists to sell it. A tablespoon of butter or a neutral oil rubbed over the surface does the same job of helping the exterior colour in the oven.
- "Hot oven"Roughly 400-450F in the vocabulary of this period; the book gives no thermometer figure. Twenty minutes at that heat with frequent basting will glaze the surface without drying the interior, since the sweetbreads are already cooked through from the simmer.
- Brown sauceIn 1913 this means a flour-and-fat roux cooked to a nut colour and let down with brown stock — an espagnole or a simplified version of it. The recipe gives no quantity; you need enough to sit in the pan and baste with. A well-reduced veal or beef stock thickened lightly gives the same result with less flour.
- Two pairsVeal sweetbreads run roughly 3/4 to 1 lb per pair, so this serves four as a main course, six as a first course. Sweetbreads are almost always a special order; ask the butcher in advance and use them within a day.
- Which gland"A pair" traditionally means the throat sweetbread (the thymus) and the heart or belly sweetbread (the pancreas) from the same animal. The heart sweetbread is the plump, even-textured one and is generally reckoned the better piece; the throat sweetbread is more irregular in shape.
- The date line"May 20" places this in the book's Calendar of Dinners, where each recipe belongs to a numbered day's menu rather than standing alone. Nothing about the dish is seasonal.
Sweetbreads — the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb — were a fixture of respectable American and English dinner tables from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1930s, priced as a delicacy and served creamed, larded, broiled or, as here, roasted in a brown sauce. The name has nothing to do with bread or sugar; its origin is not documented with any certainty, though it is generally traced to an old sense of "bread" for a piece of roast meat, with "sweet" distinguishing it from the stronger-tasting offal. Their presence in The Story of Crisco is instructive: the book was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to persuade cooks that a new hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter and lard everywhere in the kitchen, so its author, Marion Harris Neil, worked Crisco into the whole social range of the period's cooking — from plain biscuit to a company dish like this one. The tablespoon of shortening rubbed over the blanched glands is doing very little culinary work; it is doing a great deal of advertising.