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Sweetbread Salad
Drop a pair of sweetbreads into cold water as soon as received, and change the water as often as it becomes discolored; when the sweetbreads look quite white, transfer them to a sauce pan, add one-half of a teaspoonful of salt, cover with boiling water and simmer for twenty minutes; drain and drop into ice water until cold, then drain, dry on cloth and cut into half inch dice with a silver knife; marinate with a French dressing and set aside for two hours, then mix with an equal quantity of cut blanched celery, and serve with mayonnaise dressing.
A cold composed salad of poached veal sweetbreads and celery, of the sort that turned up at luncheons and card parties around 1900. The work is almost all in the soaking and poaching; the assembly takes minutes.
- The hinge: soak, then chill hardThe repeated water changes draw out blood so the meat poaches white rather than grey, and the plunge into ice water firms it so it dices cleanly instead of crumbling. Skip either step and you get ragged pink pieces that fall apart in the dressing.
- "A pair of sweetbreads"Historically this generally meant two sweetbreads, the so-called heart sweetbread (round) and throat sweetbread (elongated), which are in fact separate glands rather than lobes of one; together they run to roughly a pound. Veal is the likeliest meaning here, though the book does not say so; ask a butcher, as few supermarkets carry them. Buy them very fresh, keep them cold, and cook them the day you get them.
- Peel the membraneThe original does not say so, but after the ice bath the thin outer membrane and any tubes or fat should be pulled and trimmed away. It is far easier cold than raw, and it is the difference between tender dice and chewy ones.
- The silver knifeProbably not affectation: silver was routinely recommended in period cookery because ordinary carbon-steel blades could discolour delicate foods. Any stainless knife now does the same job.
- Simmer, do not boilTwenty minutes at a bare simmer is right for veal sweetbreads and not an overstatement. A rolling boil will make them spongy.
- French dressingIn cookery of this period that normally meant a plain oil-and-vinegar dressing with salt and pepper, proportions varying from cook to cook, not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under the name today.
- WeightingPressing the poached sweetbreads flat between two plates under a light weight while they chill is a recognised technique; it gives neater dice and is worth doing during the ice-water stage.
- Blanched celeryHere "blanched" refers to celery grown banked up so the stalks stay pale and mild, not to celery dipped in boiling water. Use the pale inner ribs of a head, cut in dice to match the meat.
- Yield and servingA pound of sweetbreads plus an equal volume of celery serves four to six as a first course, piled in lettuce cups or on chilled plates with the mayonnaise spooned over at the last moment.
Sweetbreads, the thymus and pancreas of a young calf or lamb, were prized in nineteenth-century American and European cooking as a delicate white meat, expensive enough to signal a good table but mild enough to be served to invalids and children. Their appearance in the salad chapter of a turn-of-the-century household book reflects the era's enthusiasm for cold, cut-up, mayonnaise-bound composed salads, the same impulse that produced chicken salad, lobster salad and the celery-and-nut mixtures of the same pages; celery, then a fashionable and rather costly vegetable often sold blanched and pale, was the standard crisp partner. The name has nothing to do with bread or sweetness and is generally traced to older senses of "sweet" meaning pleasant-tasting and "bread" meaning a piece of flesh. Offal of this kind largely vanished from mainstream American cooking after mid-century, which is why the ingredient now reads as more exotic than it did to the book's original readers.