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Sweetbread Cutlets
A dainty dish for company breakfast or luncheon. Trim and parboil a pair of sweetbreads; chop them fine with a silver knife. Put a teacupful of milk on to boil. Rub a tablespoonful of butter and two of flour together, and add to the boiling milk. Let cook until thick. Take from the fire, beat in the yolks of two eggs; let cool, add the sweetbreads, with half dozen chopped mushrooms, a little salt and pepper. Turn out on a large dish and stand aside until firm; form into cutlets, dip first in beaten egg and then in grated bread crumbs and fry in boiling fat. Serve with sauce Bechamel.
This is a croquette in cutlet shape: a stiff egg-thickened panade bound with chopped sweetbreads, chilled solid, breaded and fried. The hinge is the chilling — the mixture must be cold and firm all the way through before you shape it, or the cutlets will burst in the fat.
- Buying sweetbreadsA "pair" means the two lobes from one animal, the elongated throat (thymus) and the rounder heart (pancreas) sweetbread; expect roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb total. They are a special-order item from a butcher now rather than a case item, and calf is preferred to lamb for size.
- Trim and parboilSoak in several changes of cold water for an hour or two to draw the blood, then simmer 15-20 minutes in salted acidulated water, cool under cold water, and peel away the membrane and any gristle. Only after that are they firm enough to chop cleanly.
- The silver knifeAn instruction from the days of carbon steel blades, which discoloured pale foods and left a metallic taste. Any stainless knife does the job now.
- TeacupfulRead it as about three-quarters of a cup, roughly 6 fl oz; teacups of the period ran smaller than the modern cup. With 1 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp flour and two yolks it makes a thick paste that stiffens further as it cools.
- Yolks off the heatTake the pan off the burner before beating them in, as written, and stir hard. If the mixture is still near boiling the yolks will scramble and the paste will turn grainy.
- Chilling"Stand aside until firm" means the refrigerator for at least three hours, and overnight is better. Spread it no more than an inch deep on a plate or tray so it cools through.
- Frying"Boiling fat" is deep fat at 375F. Fry a few cutlets at a time, three to four minutes to a deep gold, and drain on paper. Crowding drops the temperature and the crumb coating soaks.
- BechamelIn this period that means a white sauce built on veal or chicken stock and milk or cream rather than milk alone. A plain milk bechamel is thinner in flavour but acceptable.
- YieldAbout eight cutlets, serving four at lunch; this is a hot plated dish rather than a cold or picnic one.
Sweetbreads were the aristocrat of American offal cookery from the 1870s into the 1920s, appearing on hotel menus and in invalid diets alike, and turn-of-the-century books treat them as an obvious choice for a "company breakfast" — delicate, pale, expensive and not filling. The cutlet form here is the standard croquette technique of the era: a bound mixture chilled hard, shaped, egged, crumbed and deep-fried, a method that let a cook stretch a small quantity of costly meat into a formal-looking dish. The pairing with bechamel and mushrooms follows the French service that American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s were steadily absorbing, often with the sauce names kept in French while the method was plainly domestic. The direction to use a silver knife is a reminder that stainless steel was not yet in home kitchens; carbon blades were known to blacken light-coloured foods.