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Sweetbreads for the Chafing Dish
Take three pair of sweetbreads, and after blanching them, boil them twenty minutes and cut them into dice and let them stand on the ice two or three hours or in a cool place. Melt a tablespoonful of butter in the chafing dish and add a scant tablespoonful of flour. When the mixture bubbles, add cupful of cream. Let the sauce boil (and if liked grate over the sweetbread dice, a teaspoonful of onion). Add the sweetbreads at once and let them stew five minutes. A cupful of minced mushrooms is a delicious addition to this stew. Omit the onion juice and use the mushrooms and just before removing the stew from the "blazer" stir in the yolk of an egg, mixed with some of the hot mixture. 1
A chafing-dish supper standard, and one that depends almost entirely on how the sweetbreads are handled before they ever reach the pan. The cooking at the table is a five-minute job.
- What "blanching" meant hereNot a quick dip. Period practice was generally to soak sweetbreads in several changes of cold water to draw out blood, then bring them up in water (often salted or acidulated), refresh in cold water, and press under a weight until firm. Treated this way they peel more cleanly of membrane and cut into tidy dice.
- Twenty minutes is the outside limitVeal sweetbreads are done in 15-20 minutes at a bare simmer; a hard boil makes them grainy. Lamb sweetbreads, which are smaller, need closer to 8-10 minutes.
- Three pairLikely a couple of pounds of veal sweetbreads, though 'pair' is used loosely in period sources. Either way it is a generous quantity of meat against one cup of cream; scale the sweetbreads down if you want the dice more than barely coated. The recipe gives no yield.
- The chilling step is not optionalThe chilling step -- Two or three hours on ice firms the meat so it dices without crumbling; skimp on it and you get shreds in the sauce. (Period sources often press sweetbreads under a light weight, though this recipe does not say so.)
- The blazerThe upper pan of a chafing dish, set directly over the flame. The lower pan is a water bath. Make the roux and sauce in the blazer over direct heat, then move it to the hot water before the egg yolk goes in.
- Onion juice, not grated onionOnion -- The recipe says to grate onion over the dice, then refers to it as 'onion juice'. Onion juice, scraped or pressed from a cut onion, was a common period seasoning and keeps the sauce pale and smooth. A teaspoonful is a seasoning, not a vegetable.
- The egg yolkTemper it with a few spoonfuls of the hot sauce, stir it in off the direct flame, and do not let the sauce return to a boil. Yolks begin to set around 180F, though the flour in this sauce gives some protection against curdling.
- MushroomsCook the minced mushrooms in butter first and let their water evaporate. Added raw, a cupful will thin the sauce noticeably.
Sweetbreads - the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb, the '-bread' element usually traced to Old English braed, flesh, rather than to bread proper - were an expensive delicacy in American hotel and club cooking around 1900. The chafing dish itself was having a genuine vogue in the 1890s and 1900s: whole cookbooks were devoted to it, and it let a hostess cook at the table without servants, which suited both informal suppers and the fashionable late breakfast. Dishes of this type suited it well - something delicate, already cooked, finished in a cream sauce in a few minutes - though rarebits, oysters, eggs and lobster Newburg sat alongside them. Sweetbreads have since largely retreated to restaurant menus in the English-speaking world, and most butchers now need advance notice to get them.