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Stewed Sweetbreads
(England.) Parboil a pair of sweetbreads, trim them, and cut into 8 pieces. Cover with a pint of veal broth, add salt, pepper, parsley, sweet marjoram, and a little mace. Cook, covered, for 40 minutes. Take out, strain the sauce, add the beaten yolks of 2 eggs. Pour it around and serve.
VEAL CUTLETS (as cooked in Venice.) Chop 1/2 pint of mushrooms, 2 onions, some parsley, thyme, and 2 ounces of bacon. Mix with 2 ounces of butter, season it and rub it through a sieve. Cover 2 pounds veal cutlets with this on both sides; cover these with oiled paper and cook in a little stock, turning often until tender. Take off the paper, add water or stock to the sauce, yolks of 2 eggs, and juice of a lemon, skim it, strain it, and pour over the cutlets.
VEAL CUTLETS (as cooked in Metz.) Lard 6 fine cutlets with strips of bacon. Put in a pan with 1 ounce butter, 2 onions, 2 carrots, sliced, and the trimmings of the veal, some parsley, a bayleaf, and a cup of consomme. Brown the cutlets in the butter, add the rest, cook, covered, 2 hours, strain sauce, add tomatoes to it.
Three related veal dishes run together on one page, all of them finished with an egg-yolk liaison. That liaison is the hinge: once the yolks go in, the sauce must never reach a simmer or it will scramble.
- The egg-yolk finishStrain the hot cooking liquid, then temper it into the beaten yolks a ladleful at a time before returning the mixture to a pan off direct heat. Hold it below about 180F, stirring, until it coats a spoon; boiling it curdles the sauce past recovery.
- Buying sweetbreadsA "pair" means the two lobes from one calf, the round heart sweetbread and the longer throat one, roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb together. Order them from a butcher; they are rarely on general display.
- Soak before you parboilThe recipe assumes knowledge it does not state. Sweetbreads are soaked in several changes of cold water for a few hours to draw out blood, then blanched, cooled, and the membrane and gristle peeled off while still pliable. That is the trimming step.
- Forty minutes is longOnce parboiled and trimmed, sweetbreads need only 15 to 20 minutes gently covered in broth to be tender. Forty minutes at anything above a bare tremble leaves them cottony.
- Veal brothAn unsalted light veal or chicken stock stands in. A pint here is 2 cups; if you are working from a British edition of the period, the imperial pint is 20 fl oz.
- MaceThe dried aril of nutmeg, warmer and less sweet than the seed. Blade mace is best in a braise and can be lifted out; ground mace, use a scant 1/4 teaspoon for a pint.
- Oiled paperIn the Venice cutlets this is a buttered or oiled parchment cartouche laid directly on the meat to keep the mushroom-bacon paste in place and stop the surface drying. Parchment does the job; foil traps too much steam.
- Larding, Metz cutletsThreading strips of pork fat through lean veal with a larding needle is largely obsolete. Draping thin bacon or barding fat over the cutlets before browning gives a similar result, though you lose the interior seam of fat.
- YieldThe sweetbreads serve four as an entree course, two as a main. The Metz cutlets, six. The Venice cutlets, four.
Sweetbreads, the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb, were a delicacy across nineteenth-century European cookery precisely because they are mild, pale and tender, qualities that fashionable dining prized. The three recipes here belong to the era of the veal entree, when a small dish of white meat in a rich, egg-thickened sauce sat between fish and roast in a formal dinner. The book's habit of tagging each version with a place, England, Venice, Metz, suggests the appeal of collections of this kind, which offered continental cooking to a home audience. Metz, in Lorraine, passed to Germany in 1871 and returned to France in 1918, so the attribution may reflect the period's shifting borders. The liaison of egg yolks is the technique binding all three.