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Broiled Sweetbreads
(Paris.) Blanch two fine sweetbreads and cook them for 20 minutes in a cup of stock. Drain them, and when cold dip them in a rich cream sauce. When this is firm, roll them in bread-crumbs and a thin slice of ham, then tie each in oiled paper. Broil them on a gridiron, take off the paper, and serve with a border of spinach.
SWEETBREAD CUTLETS (as cooked in Montpellier.).
Soak a pair of large sweetbreads in salt and water, parboil them, and let them cool. Cut into shape and dip in aspic jelly, melted. When it is firm, arrange in a circle and fill the centre with asparagus tips cooked in stock and cut up; pour mayonnaise sauce over the asparagus and put on ice until needed.
Two Continental treatments on one page: a hot broiled sweetbread wrapped in paper, and a cold aspic-glazed version. Both depend on the same preliminary work, which the original assumes you already know.
- What a sweetbread isThe thymus (the throat sweetbread, whose lower lobe is the round, firm 'heart' sweetbread generally reckoned the better buy) or the pancreas (the belly or stomach sweetbread) of a milk-fed calf or lamb. Order ahead from a butcher, allow one pair per two people, and use them within a day.
- "Blanch" means soak, then boil brieflySoak 2 to 3 hours in several changes of cold salted water until the water runs clear, then bring to a bare simmer for 3 to 5 minutes, cool, and peel away the membrane and any gristle. Press between two plates with a weight for an hour so they slice cleanly.
- A cup of stock is not enoughUse enough stock to cover, kept at a bare simmer rather than a boil. Twenty minutes suits a large pair of veal sweetbreads; lamb sweetbreads are done in 10 to 12.
- Cook them throughOffal glands should reach 160F internally, which the 20-minute poach achieves comfortably. The cutlet recipe says only "parboil," and since nothing is cooked afterwards, that first cooking has to be a genuine simmer to done, not a dip.
- The "rich cream sauce"A thick reduced velouté or béchamel, roughly the consistency of a soft dough when cold. It must be chilled until it sets firm on the sweetbread, or the crumbs will not hold and the coating slides off in the broiler.
- Oiled paperThis is cooking en papillote. Parchment brushed with oil or clarified butter does the job; do not substitute waxed paper, which smokes and melts. Kitchen twine, not the plastic-cored kind.
- BroilingA gridiron sat over coals at moderate heat. Under a modern broiler, work about 5 inches from the element and turn the parcels, roughly 4 to 5 minutes a side, until the ham is crisp and the paper browned. The interior is already cooked; you are only heating and colouring.
- Aspic and mayonnaiseThe Montpellier version needs a clear, well-set savoury jelly, melted and cooled to the point of thickening before dipping, or it runs off. Mayonnaise made with raw yolks is best done with pasteurised eggs if the dish will sit on ice for any length of time.
- YieldEach recipe serves two generously or four as an entrée in the older sense, a small course between fish and roast.
Sweetbreads were the aristocrat of offal in the late nineteenth century, mild enough to take delicate sauces and expensive enough to belong on a company menu, which is why cookbooks of this period give them pages of variations. The two headings here, Paris and Montpellier, seem to reflect the conceit of the book: dishes gathered as souvenirs of travel and reproduced for a household cook at home, the place name doing the work of a recommendation. Both methods are recognisably professional French practice of the era, the first a papillote borrowed from restaurant kitchens to keep a delicate braised gland from drying over coals, the second a cold entrée in the aspic-and-mayonnaise style often associated with buffet cookery in the wake of Carême's followers. The green border of spinach and the ring of asparagus tips are not garnish for its own sake but a way of framing a pale meat on a platter.