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Sweetbread Patties (Boil a sweetbread gently skin)
Boil a sweetbread gently, skin it and chop finely with a very little tender boiled ham. Add one gill of white sauce, same quantity of cream, a little cayenne, white pepper, salt. Make the mince very hot, flavor it with tarragon vinegar, and with it fill the patties, which should be made of the lightest puff paste. Serve daintily, very hot.
A late-Victorian savoury filling for pastry shells, and one that depends almost entirely on how the sweetbread is handled before it goes near the sauce. Everything after the blanching is quick work.
- Prepare the sweetbread firstSoak it in several changes of cold water for an hour or two until it stops leaching pink, then simmer gently in salted water with a splash of vinegar for 15-20 minutes. Cool it, and the membrane and connective tissue pull away with your fingers; skinning a warm sweetbread is much harder.
- "Boil gently" means a bare simmerA rolling boil toughens the gland and makes it crumble rather than slice. Keep the water at a shiver, and press the cooked sweetbread between two plates while it cools if you want it firm enough to chop cleanly.
- A gill is half a cupA gill is a quarter-pint -- reckoned as half a cup (4 fl oz) in American books, 5 fl oz under imperial measure, so between half and two-thirds of a cup each of white sauce and cream. Either way it is a great deal of liquid for one sweetbread, and the mince will be loose; reduce it over the heat until it mounds on a spoon or the pastry will collapse.
- White sauce here is a bechamelWhite sauce here would be a plain butter-flour-and-milk white sauce of the bechamel type -- equal butter and flour cooked without colour, milk whisked in, salt and white pepper. White pepper and cayenne rather than black were probably preferred for appearance: no dark specks in a pale filling.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and easily made by steeping fresh tarragon in white wine vinegar for a week. Add it off the heat and by the half teaspoon, tasting as you go; its job is to cut the cream, not to announce itself.
- "The patties"Not modern patties but small puff-pastry cases -- vol-au-vent or bouchee shells. Store-bought all-butter puff, cut in rounds with a smaller round scored on top, bakes at 400F until risen and dry through; the raw centre of the shell lifts out to make the cavity.
- Fill at the last momentHot filling in a hot shell, served immediately. Pastry filled in advance turns to paste, which is why the original insists twice on "very hot."
- YieldOne veal sweetbread of about 3/4 lb, with the ham and sauce reduced, fills roughly a dozen small shells -- enough for six as a first course or a tray of them for a party.
Sweetbreads -- the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb, despite the name suggesting neither sweetness nor bread -- were among the most prized items on a nineteenth-century butcher's block, mild and delicate enough to be served to invalids and grand enough for a dinner party. Their appearance in a chapter of sandwiches reflects how loosely that word was used around 1900: anything small, hand-held and destined for a tea table, a ball supper or a luncheon plate could be filed there, filled pastry cases included. The dish itself is French in method, a salpicon bound with bechamel and cream and spooned into vol-au-vent shells, and it turns up in English and American household books through the whole period, usually with ham or tongue for savour and a sharp vinegar to keep the richness in check.