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Sweetbreads
(Modena.) Blanch and cut into 4 pieces a pair of fine sweetbreads. Season, fry them, and drain them. Have ready 1 cup of cold chicken and the same of beef tongue, cut into strips, also a cup of cooked spaghetti, covered with tomato sauce. Arrange the spaghetti in the middle of a plate, put the sweetbreads over it and arrange the chicken in one end of the plate and the tongue at the other. Pour some tomato sauce over all and serve hot.
A composed plate rather than a cooked dish: three ready components arranged over sauced spaghetti. Almost all the work is in the sweetbreads themselves, and the recipe assumes you already know how to handle them.
- What "a pair" meansVeal sweetbreads come as two glands, the round heart-shaped one and the longer throat one; a pair is roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb. Ask a butcher to order them, and use them within a day of purchase since they spoil quickly.
- Blanching, in fullThe single instruction the recipe leans on and does not explain. Soak in several changes of cold water for a few hours until the water runs clear, simmer 15-20 minutes in salted water with a little lemon or vinegar, then plunge into ice water, peel away the outer membrane and fat, and press between two plates under a weight for an hour. Unpressed sweetbreads fall apart when cut and fried.
- Season, fry themAfter blanching they are already cooked through; the frying is for colour only. Flour or egg-and-crumb them, and give them 2-3 minutes a side in butter or oil until golden. Long frying dries the interior to chalk.
- SpaghettiCookbooks of this period often directed far longer boiling than we would now. Cook to the package direction, 8-10 minutes, and dress it with the tomato sauce while hot so it does not set into a block.
- Cold chicken and tongueBoth are leftovers in the original scheme: poached or roast chicken, and beef tongue simmered and peeled. A cup of each, cut in strips the width of a finger. Good deli tongue is a fair substitute; smoked tongue will read saltier than intended.
- Tomato sauceA plain sauce, not a long-simmered ragu. Roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups total: some for the spaghetti, the rest poured over at the table.
- ServingNo yield is given. As written it makes two generous plates or four smaller ones. The chicken is specified cold and the tongue is cooked in advance, so warm them briefly in a little sauce, and assemble at the last minute.
Sweetbreads were standard middle-class dining in 1900 in a way they no longer are, appearing in American and English cookbooks as an entree between fish and roast, and they carried none of the specialist air they have today. What marks this version is the attribution to Modena, in Emilia: the tongue and the chicken belong to a region whose cooking is built on boiled meats and on using up what the pot leaves behind. Books of the Saucepan Over the Sea type are generally supposed to have gathered such dishes from travel and from foreign cooks working in Anglo-American households, and the result is often a hybrid, in this case an Italian assembly of cold meats plated to the conventions of a Victorian entree, with the arrangement on the dish treated as seriously as the cooking.