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Sweetbread, Olive and Celery Salad
Drop the sweetbreads into cold water and change the water until well blanched; put them into a saucepan, and for each pair of sweetbreads allow one clove, one-half of a bay leaf, one-half of a teaspoonful of salt, cover with boiling water and simmer for twenty-one minutes; then drain and drop into cold water; when cold, drain, dry and break or cut with silver knife into bits. By measurement allow one part of olives, four parts of celery to five parts of sweetbreads; cut the olives in strips, mix with the meat and marinate for several hours with French dressing, serving with mayonnaise.
A luncheon salad built on the ratio rather than on weights: five parts sweetbread, four parts celery, one part olive, all by volume. Everything else is technique.
- What a sweetbread isVeal thymus (the long, lobed "throat" bread) or pancreas (the rounder "heart" bread); either can be used here. A pair may run something over a pound and will usually need to be ordered from a butcher.
- The soaking is the hinge"Change the water until well blanched" means several changes of cold water over 2 to 4 hours, refrigerated, until the water runs clear and the glands are pale. Skip it and the salad tastes of blood.
- Peel after poachingThe recipe does not say so, but once the poached sweetbreads have cooled you should pull away the outer membrane and any fat or tubing. Weighting them under a plate for an hour firms the flesh so it breaks into neat pieces.
- Twenty-one minutesAn oddly precise number. A gentle simmer, never a boil, for about 20 minutes suits a full pair; smaller thymus lobes are done in 12 to 15.
- The silver knifeCarbon steel blades of the period discoloured pale meat and fruit on contact. Stainless steel does not, so use any sharp knife, though tearing by hand gives a better surface for the dressing to cling to.
- OlivesBrine-cured green olives. Buy pitted green olives and cut them into strips; drain them well so the brine does not thin the dressing.
- French dressingPeriod American usage means a simple vinaigrette, about three parts oil to one of vinegar with salt and pepper, shaken; mustard is sometimes but not always present. Marinate the sweetbreads and olives in it for 2 to 4 hours in the refrigerator, then add the celery shortly before serving so it stays crisp.
- The mayonnaiseServed as a sauce spooned over or beside the salad, not stirred through. If you make it by hand it contains raw egg, so use pasteurised eggs for anyone elderly, pregnant or immunocompromised.
- YieldA pair of sweetbreads dressed at these proportions gives about 6 cups of salad, enough for 4 to 6 as a luncheon course on lettuce.
Sweetbreads occupied a peculiar double position in American cooking around the turn of the twentieth century: delicate enough to be prescribed for invalids and convalescents, expensive enough to headline a ladies' luncheon. Salads of this kind, in which a cooked meat is diced, marinated, and masked with mayonnaise, were a standard formula of the period's salad chapters, and the same template produced chicken salad, lobster salad and sweetbread-and-cucumber. The olives point to a convenience of the period: bottled Spanish green olives were increasingly available in American groceries by the late nineteenth century and turn up often in cookbooks of this generation as a mark of the fashionable table. The instruction to use a silver knife is a small fossil of pre-stainless kitchens, when ordinary carbon blades left grey streaks on pale flesh.