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This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
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Amourettes
(Old French and Roman recipe.) Cut up and steep 2 pounds of beef marrow. Drain it, add salt and pepper, and 1 cup of tomato sauce. Then add 1/2 pound of chopped ham and 1/4 pound of cooked and sliced truffles. Line a mould with forcemeat, made of bread-crumbs, herbs, and butter, then fill with the above mixture. Steam it for 3/4 hour, turn out on a hot dish, and serve with mushrooms, and 1/2 pint of white sauce. SWEETBREADS (as cooked in Dauphiny.).
Soak and parboil 2 large heart sweetbreads, drain them, lard with strips of pork, and place in a casserole with 2 carrots and 2 onions sliced, and some parsley, and 1/2 pint consomme. Cover closely with a pie plate, on which put something heavy, and braise them. In France the plate is of earthenware, and live coals are kept on top to assist the baking or braising, as it is called. Serve with green peas.
Two dishes are run together in this entry: a moulded marrow pudding and a braise of sweetbreads from the Dauphiné. Both belong to a style of cooking built around organ meats that were cheap in 1900 and are now specialty orders.
- What amourettes actually areIn classical French kitchens amourettes means the spinal marrow of beef or veal, not the marrow from leg bones. Beef spinal cord is now controlled as specified risk material because of BSE and, for cattle over the relevant age limits, is kept out of the human food supply in the US, UK and EU; it is not something to source casually. Read the recipe as written — bone marrow, sold by the pound as scooped marrow or in split canoe bones — and it is an ordinary rich forcemeat pudding.
- Steep, and mean itMarrow needs 12 to 24 hours in cold salted water in the refrigerator, changed several times, to draw out blood; otherwise it greys and tastes metallic. This soaking is the whole point of "steep" and "drain" and the dish fails without it.
- Forcemeat liningBread-crumbs, herbs and butter here means a paste stiff enough to press against the mould — roughly 2 cups fresh crumbs, 4 oz softened butter, chopped parsley and thyme, bound with an egg. Butter the mould heavily first or it will not turn out.
- Steaming the mouldCover the filled mould tightly with buttered paper and foil and set it in a covered pot with water halfway up the sides, at a bare simmer for the 45 minutes given. Check the centre reaches 160F; marrow melts and the crumb case must set around it.
- TrufflesA quarter pound of sliced truffle is a luxury measure from a period when truffles were far more plentiful and commonly sold preserved in tins. Brown or summer truffle, or a smaller quantity of good preserved truffle with its juice, keeps the dish recognisable without absurd cost.
- Half a pintHalf a pint of white sauce is one cup; half a pint of consommé likewise. The tomato sauce should be thick and reduced, not a thin passata, or the filling will not hold.
- "Casserole" and the weighted plateThe casserole is the heavy stewpan, not a baking dish. The pie plate weighted with live coals is a Dutch oven arrangement giving heat from above as well as below; a lidded braiser in a 300–325F oven does the same work. Braise the sweetbreads about 45 minutes to an hour, until a skewer meets no resistance.
- Heart sweetbreads and larding"Heart" sweetbread is the rounder lobe lying nearer the heart rather than the elongated throat sweetbread; either will do, and both need soaking in several changes of cold water, then a brief parboil, then pressing under a weight before larding. In place of a larding needle, wrap the sweetbreads in thin sheets of fatback or unsmoked bacon.
- YieldThe marrow mould serves six to eight as a small entrée — it is very rich. The two sweetbreads serve four.
Amourettes — literally "little loves" — is the old French kitchen name for spinal marrow, prized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for vol-au-vent fillings, fritters and garnishes precisely because it cooked to a texture nothing else could imitate. The claim of Roman ancestry made in the heading is the sort of pedigree Victorian and Edwardian compilers liked to attach to marrow dishes, and while Roman cooks certainly ate marrow, no direct line to this particular mould is documented. The second half of the entry, the Dauphiné sweetbreads, preserves something more concrete: the pre-range technique of braising under an earthenware plate heaped with embers, a method still visible in the shape of old daubières with dished, rimmed lids made to hold coals. Both recipes reflect the book's project of collecting continental household cooking for American readers, at a period when offal was everyday butcher's stock rather than a restaurant curiosity.