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Sweetbread Sandwich
Cook sweetbreads until tender. When cold, remove skin, chop fine, season with salt and pepper, add one cup of finely chopped celery, and a dash of mayonnaise dressing; spread on thin slices of lightly buttered white bread. Cover with another slice and garnish with an olive.
A straightforward chopped-meat sandwich filling, but it assumes you know how to handle sweetbreads, which the book does not explain. Everything hinges on the preparation before the chopping starts.
- What sweetbreads areThe thymus and pancreas glands of a calf or lamb, sold by butchers as "heart" (round, plumper) and "throat" (longer, more irregular) sweetbreads. Veal heart sweetbreads are the ones worth buying for this; they hold together when chopped. Expect to order them ahead.
- Soak and blanch first"Cook sweetbreads until tender" skips two steps many period cookbooks took for granted. Soak them in several changes of cold water for two to three hours to draw out blood, then blanch in acidulated water at a bare simmer for about 15 minutes until firm and opaque throughout.
- Press them coldAfter blanching, plunge into ice water, peel away the membrane and fat while still damp, then press between two plates with a weight in the refrigerator for an hour or more. Pressed sweetbreads chop cleanly; unpressed ones smear.
- Cook them throughOffal of this kind is highly perishable and should be cooked to 160F and used the same day or the next. Buy sweetbreads fresh or well frozen, keep them cold throughout the soaking, and do not leave the finished filling out at room temperature.
- Celery proportionOne cup of chopped celery is a lot against the meat from a single pair of sweetbreads (roughly a pound raw, less after trimming). Half a cup gives crunch without turning the filling into celery salad; use the full cup only if you are working with two pounds.
- "A dash of mayonnaise"Enough to bind, not to dress: two to three tablespoons for a pound of chopped meat. Too much and the filling weeps into the bread. A little lemon juice and a pinch of cayenne wake up what is otherwise a very mild mixture.
- The breadThin slices of a close-crumbed white sandwich loaf, buttered edge to edge, a period method of sealing bread against a moist filling. Cut off crusts and quarter the sandwiches if you are serving them at tea or a luncheon.
- YieldA pound of raw sweetbreads makes filling for six to eight rounds of sandwiches, or two to three dozen small quartered ones.
Sweetbreads occupied an odd rank in American cooking: genuinely a delicacy, priced accordingly on hotel and club menus, yet plentiful enough that a household cookbook could treat them as a routine sandwich filling. The pairing with celery and mayonnaise is the standard formula of the era, applied interchangeably to chicken, lobster, veal and sweetbreads, and it reflects how far the homemade mayonnaise habit had spread through the tea-table repertoire. The name is thought to have little to do with sweetness or with bread; it is generally traced to Middle English usage in which bread or brede meant a piece of roast flesh, with "sweet" distinguishing the mild-tasting gland from stronger offal. The olive garnish, skewered on a pick or set beside the sandwich, was a common finishing touch of the period's luncheon plate.