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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 straightforward pepper-and-onion garnish for a large folded omelet. The only real translation needed is the shortening and the two pans the method quietly assumes.
- Split the CriscoThe three tablespoons are divided: about 1 1/2 tablespoons for the vegetables, the rest for the omelet pan. Any neutral fat works; butter will brown during the 20-minute sweat, so keep it for the eggs if you want the flavor.
- "Cook slowly" means sweat, not fryCovered over low heat for 20 minutes softens the onion and peppers to near-melting without color. If they start to sizzle hard or catch, the heat is too high and the sauce turns bitter.
- What the "Spanish sauce" is hereDespite the name, there is no tomato in this version -- it is essentially a piperade of onion, sweet peppers and mushrooms. Seed and finely dice both peppers; the recipe says only "6 mushrooms" and gives no size, so slice whatever you have to match the diced vegetables.
- Water, not milkA tablespoon of water per egg is a proportion that turns up in other omelet recipes of the period. Water is held to steam and lighten the eggs, where milk is said to make them denser and more likely to weep.
- Two pans, or two omeletsSix eggs is more than most 10-inch pans handle well. Either use a 12-inch pan or make two three-egg omelets and garnish both. Nonstick or a well-seasoned steel pan; the eggs should set in two to three minutes over medium-high heat and still be moist inside.
- Plating as writtenThe omelet goes down the center of a hot platter and the vegetables are banked at either end rather than folded inside.
- YieldServes three, or four modestly. Both parts want to be genuinely hot, so cook the vegetables first and hold them covered while the eggs go.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil to introduce American cooks to the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening Procter & Gamble had launched two years earlier, and its "Calendar of Dinners" exists to prove the product could stand in for butter, lard and suet across an entire year of menus -- hence the shortening in what a French cook would have made with butter alone. The dish itself belongs to a long line of American "Spanish" omelets, a name applied loosely from the later nineteenth century onward to eggs served with a cooked pepper-and-onion garnish; this one's omission of tomato, together with the mushrooms, puts it closer to a Basque or Provencal piperade than to the tomato-heavy diner version that later dominated.
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.