Sweetbreads as Hedge-Hogs

The Accomplished Housekeeper, and Universal Cook by T. Williams, 1797
They just didn’t look like hedgehogs – I fluffed them out, made them all spikey, but as soon as they started cooking they flattened right out again. If you did them in more of a batter, and deep fried them, it could work.

Naturally this begs the question as to why you’d want your sweetbreads to look like hedgehogs, but I’m sure there are any number of good reasons. Perhaps it was hard to get actual hedgehogs to fry – especially the smaller, more convenient sizes.

The unusual texture and surface characteristics of the pancreas with its many folds, twists and turns, does make it a good candidate for hedgehog impersonation; at least theoretically.

The sweetbreads (which are either pancreas or thymus, usually of veal – this was pancreas) are soaked to remove excess “fluids”, then blanched briefly. Because of the spongy nature of the organ, it absorbs a great deal of water and has to be pressed afterwards. I’ve seen suggestions to press overnight, but I only did it for an hour or so – in retrospect, a bit more pressing under a heavier weight (I used a heavy frying pan with a sauce pan full of water on top of it) might have been in order.

Frying

They are then larded with bacon – I just wrapped the fat bits of bacon around the pieces before breading them – and fried. (Larding can also mean injecting or stuffing with fat, but that would have been difficult with the sweetbreads). Then a bit of broth, some white wine, and some cullis to thicken and add flavor (cullis is a ham reduction – I had some around from a previous recipe. It’s made by reducing 1/2 pound of ham and bacon along with a few carrots, some onions, shallots, garlic and a cup of veal stock into 5 tablespoons of brown goo). You can see the spoonful of cullis in the upper right of the photo.

Sauce

It’s hard to describe the final product adequately – it’s not strange enough for superlatives, but it isn’t really like anything else, either. There is a hint of sweetness, or the trick of sweetness, like cinnamon or nutmeg tricks your brain into experiencing sweetness. The flesh is firm but indistinct and homogeneous (though so is most chicken these days). I wouldn’t call the taste (without the sauce) insipid, as the author of the recipe does, but it certainly needs seasoning. Before I got too far describing its deficiencies though, it WAS good – I could imagine it being fantastic with a relish or an Indian chutney, and it almost certainly respond well to some heat – chilis or a surfeit of black pepper. The sauce as prepared is subtle and savory, but doesn’t quite POP. Still, pancreas…yum!

Drumette or chicken disassembled and reassembled to look like a drumette?

One should take chickens and scald them and tear them apart and cut all the meat from the bone and shred it small. Then boil the bones and take off the broth and wind the meat around the bones. Sprinkle some powder of cinnamon on it and then place it in a dough that is made of wheat flour and a beaten egg and then cook it in butter or lard. [1]

Cookbooks are full of dishes, often served between courses, that are meant as entertainments. In French they’re called entremets and evolved to include some form of acted entertainment (an edible ice sculpture accompanied by a short morality play, or a simulated course that is actually – from plates to forks to fowl – made entirely out of sugar paste with a minstrel singing an ode to sweetness). In England they were called subtleties. At large banquets in the Middle Ages, castles were built out of cooked birds with wild boar, deer, goats and rabbits roasted and posed to resemble knights (we cooked a turkey last Thanksgiving – as a main course – in a similar vein) and peacocks were frequently skinned, roasted, and then redressed in their old skin and served (which was pretty entertaining until everyone got salmonella).

All of which reminded me both of entremets and Cruditas’ chief semiotician, Josh Glenn, of hilobrow.com who has cogently discussed “fake authenticity” for years. Unless you were royalty and in the habit of being served peacock, the last thing you needed in 1153 was authenticity – you were probably drowning in the stuff. You’d wake up every morning with the pungent scent of authenticity attacking your nostrils like a 300 pound wild boar after a truffle. No, what you needed was something else – something charming, but, like fake authenticity, de-clawed. You needed fake inauthenticity. Neither chicken, nor something disguised as chicken, it’s chicken disguised as something disguised as chicken; a sort of entremet for the third estate.

A chicken is roasted, its meat pulled from the bones.

The meat stripped from the bones

The long bones are then boiled and cleaned.

Boiled bones

Long bones boiled and cleaned

The meat is then wound back onto the bones and secured with a batter (I used something resembling a fritter batter – the instructions were “wheat flour and a beaten egg”).

A batter - I varied the viscosity as I cooked them, but it made amazingly little difference.

And cooked…

Be careful to rotate while cooking

Don't worry if some of yours look funny - I'm only showing the better ones

Two sauces were prepared, also from An Early XIII Century Northern-European Cookbook by Rudolf Grewe (as it appeared in Proceedings: Current Research in Culinary History: Sources, Topics, and Methods, 1985).

“one should take mustard seeds, add a fourth part of honey and grind it with good vinegar. It is good for forty days.”

Early medieval honey mustard sauce

and “A sauce of minimal value. One should take onions and cut them as small as peas, and the same amount of parsely, and pour it in some broth, and add the fourth part of vinegar. These sauces you can seal up.”

A sauce of minimal value

To be fair, the sauce of minimal value is pretty good.

Once you’ve made this, you’re going to want to serve it for parties, make it for the Super Bowl, bring it to pot-lucks. Your children will clamor for some blomæth høns.

Here is the full variety of shapes we ended up with – from some pretty good approximations of legs and drumettes, to some that are more, um, imaginative.

Legs, drumettes, double legs, parts from radioactive spider chickens, we had it all.

[1]From a group of 13th century manuscripts translated by Rudolf Grew as Libellus De Arte Coquinaria and published in 2001. (this recipe, with the name of the dish which was omitted in the book, was taken from Current Research in Culinary History, Radcliffe, 1985 where he published an initial version of the cookbook)

The inspiration for Sauce Espagnole

The earliest recipe I’ve found for sauce Espagnole is in François Massialot’s Cuisinier Royal et Bourgeois which first appeared in 1691 – the edition is from 1705, but there wasn’t a revised edition until 1712. Massialot’s appears under the recipe “Perdrix sausse à L’Espagnole” or Partridge sauce Espagnole and calls for Burgundy wine, partridge and partridge liver, ham essence, truffles, onion, garlic and clove.

Recipe from the 1740 Le Cuisinier Gascon

The anonymous author of Le Cuisinier Gascon is the next with a recipe (though Menon mentions Sauce Espagnole a few times and, like La Varenne in his Le Cuisinier François (1651), he has a recipe for the somewhat similar Sauce Robert) which is similar but subtracts the truffles, liver (ironically because the Gascon author is insane about foie gras) clove and garlic, and adds veal, shallots, coriander and carrots, and swaps Champagne for the Burgundy.

A partridge hanging about

Audot in his Cuisiniere de la Campagne of 1832 helpfully suggests that you make it after a party when you have a bunch of fowl and game birds lying around to make the sauce. His is substantially similar but doesn’t speciifically mention partridge and uses white wine, mushrooms and flour (the beginning of attempts to thicken the sauce).

But the master, Antonin Carême does use partridge, with what is still the classic (if hardly used) recipe – he also codified the steps, omitted the wine, and added a roux [reduce veal and partridge to a residue, add residue to stock and remaining ingredients, reduce, skim, etc.] In addition, he officially made this brown sauce one of the 5 “Mother Sauces” that give birth to all the other secondary and tertiary sauces in the French Pantheon.

Escoffier’s final revision removes the meat and replaces the vegetables with a mirepoix (a vegetable, and sometimes ham, essence) and a significant amount of tomato paste – this is the Espagnole, or brown sauce, that is used to make the now more common demi-glace. The meatliness of the Espagnole being now but a memory, Escoffier gives instructions for making a “Lenten Espagnole” with fish fumet.

These days, it’s difficult to find a recipe that includes the partridge that started it all.

Filets de Boeuf grillés à la Polonoise.

Vous Prenez un filet de Boeuf motifié, vous le parez, le coupez en deux & en levez plusieurs feuilles, que vous étendez, en les battant; vous avez une farce de foyes gras que vous mettez dessus, & les roulez feuille par feuille, & les mettez griller en les arrosant d’huile; etant cuits, vous le serves avec une sauce à L’Espagnole, ou autre: Veau, Mouton, & volaille de même: les filets sautés de Mouton au four.

Grilled Beef Fillets in the Polish Style.

You take a fillet of beef pounded, trimmed, cut it into two and a lift in several sheets, you lie them down, after pounding them, you layer with foie gras, and roll the leaf by leaf, and grill them, spraying them with oil, you serve with a sauce Espagnole or another; cook Veal, Lamb, Poultry in the same fashion: fried fillets of baked lamb.

Having just translated this outside of my head, I’ve finally realized what that crazy Cuisinier Gascon was getting at (have I mentioned that he was neither a Cuisinier nor a Gascon, but a member of the French minor nobility), sadly AFTER making the dish. No real harm done, but in translating this, and reading the section on Polonaise from my Larousse Gastronomique, I realized that the foie gras was supposed to be sandwiched between thin layers of beef and then rolled, where I rolled up each “sheet” with the foie gras inside. I assume it’s related to a “Polonaise” that has survived; a brioche soaked in rum and rolled with candied fruit, but perhaps Polish cuisine is simply rife with items rolled up with one another (which sounds like a lovely basis for a cuisine, actually).

Brioche Polonaise

Sauce à L’Espagnole.

Vous soncez une casserole de deux noix de veau, de tranche de jambon, deux Perdrix ou Perdreaux au fumet, un bouquet; vous faites suer le tout & attacher légerement, & le mouillez du coulis ordinaire, vin de Champagne, huile, l’aissaisonnement ordinaire, un peu de coriandre, trois tranches de citron: étant cuite de bon goût, vous vous en servez à ce que vous voulez.

Sauce Espagnole.

You start a saucepan with two veal medallions, a slice of ham two Partridges or Partridge hens and a bouquet [of fresh herbs], you sweat it all and add a coulis [ham essence], oil, ordinary seasoning, a little coriander, three slices of lemon: being cooked taste, you serve it as you will.

This is delightful minimalism, and a difficult recipe to piece together without other sources – luckily, sources for Sauce Espagnole abound, so it was fairly simple to extract CG’s meaning from this compacted recipe. Amazingly, the traditional recipe really does start with veal medallions, ham and a partridge – it also includes veal stock, and a roux as a thickener (some of this – the roux, the stock – may have been assumed by the author. It’s a sauce, after all). I played a little fast and loose, not having veal medallions or partridge at hand, I settled for veal stock, a couple or chicken thighs, and a pair of sirloin bones to go with ham and some vegetables (stolen from alternate Espagnole recipes) – I also didn’t have any ham essence around so used some extra ham instead. In Carême’s finally word on Sauce Espagnole, the veal/ham/partridge is covered in stock and then reduced into a sort of paste which is used to flavor the second round of sauce which is then reduced in turn. I stopped just short of this, figuring this earlier version of the sauce, meant to be used alone (where Carême’s was meant more as a powerful base to be diluted into secondary sauces), would have been a slightly less heady concoction.

Here’s what happened:

The meats with carrots, mushrooms, onions, shallots, garlic, stock

Reduced

And reduced further

Then passed through a fine strainer - this takes some time

Until all that remains is a rich broth

Flank steak slice, beaten, and spread with foie gras

Rolled and tied

And sauced

Almost nailed this one – just a little foie gras short of perfect. Sauce Espagnole isn’t so much strong as it is dense and redolent – having had it, I now realize that gravy is a sort of vague gesture towards the platonic ideal of Sauce Espagnole. Really wondrous stuff – it goes perfectly with the foie gras, so much so that the steak was often secondary to the joys of mopping up the sauce with a piece of bread. Next time I’ll slice it very thin, perhaps even carpaccio thin, and layer with a bit more foie gras, but this was a lovely start and a fine introduction to the sybaritic joys of Sauce Espagnole.

Encarnacion Pinedo

Recipe taken from Encarnación's Kitchen: Mexican Recipes from Nineteenth-Century California itself a translation of Encarnación Pinedo’s, El cocinero español (San Francisco, 1898), the first Spanish language cookery text published in California. Pinedo presents her recipes as Spanish (despite the profusion of Mexican ingredients) and in the European tradition traced from Apicius (whom she names) through classic French and Italian cuisine. This is the third Spanish language cookbook published in America and the first outside of the northeastern United States.

Sirloin, onion, mushrooms, raisins, apple, olive

Roasted in the broiler - using tongs and roasting them on a gas burner works well also

We used poblano chiles, if you use something hotter - like green chiles (which is what we used when we lived in New Mexico) or even Anaheims, be careful when you peel them or use gloves.

Stuffed

Submerged in the egg whites. If beating the whites by hand, try to use a copper bowl - it increases the egg's volume.

Que bueno.

Obviously this is a quintessentially Mexican/American dish and not in the Spanish culinary tradition, and it’s easy to dismiss her concerns as snobbery, but what she was saying, in a manner that now seems a bit archaic, was: This is a Cuisine, and a tradition that I’m cooking in. I may be using ingredients, like chiles, that seem strange back in the Old World (though they were enthusiastically taken up and adapted in India, Africa and the Far East) but my methods and scope are traditional. She was also trying to elevate this new California cuisine above the “Yankee” English cookery that she found insipid.

A poultry dealer

Game birds are more difficult to find for a reasonable price than you’d like – makes you think about buying a shotgun – but I turned up some lovely frozen quail at my local market (The Roslindale Fish Market for those in the Boston area) and did them up with a sort of composite recipe initially inspired by Scappi (in his Opera).

Scappi, Opera (1570), recipe 131:

Several ways to roast and do up turtle-doves and quail (side note: I had a de-clawed cat growing up whose undying desire it was to catch a turtle dove. Never did it – caught moles by the hundreds, robins, a bat once, but never one of those enticingly round turtle-doves)

Get a turtle-dove in its season, which goes from June to the end of November. Right after it is dead, pluck it dry and sear it on coals without drawing it. Put it on a spit crosswise and set it to roast over a sprightly little fire, turning it rapidly so its grease will not drip off. When it is almost done, make up its crust of flour, fennel flour, sugar, salt and grated bread…Sometimes fat quail are semi-salted in salt and fennel flour and left in a wooden or earthenware vessel for three or four days.

Quail dredged in fennel flour and salt

In the course of my investigations, I ran across some charming Provençal ideas for quail which included wrapping them in grape leaves and then roasting them. I merged these – dredging the quail in fennel flour (which I made with a 20 to 1, or thereabouts, mixture of mortar crushed fennel and flour) and salt before wrapping them in grape leaves and putting them on the spit.

Wrapped in grape leaves

I found the grape leaves adhere pretty well and you can just tuck them in around the thighs to keep them situated.

Quail on the spit.

The grape leaves slowly catch fire and disintegrate, and the remains are easily removed. They keep the quail wonderfully moist, and leave a very faint briny flavor.

Quail cooking for Crudifest

I also cooked quail for Crudifest, using the same techniques, but on a larger scale. I soaked a wooden dowel overnight to keep it from catching fire, but it quickly caught fire anyway.

Grilling quail in the rain

Also it was pouring rain.

You can see the remains of my spit in the foreground.

Quail, sautéed

I tried the second suggestion as well – even leaving it for a few days in an earthenware pot. The quail starts to sweat and by the end, appeared to be beginning to melt from the salt (which gives them a slightly troubling appearance but is harmless). It’s not bad like this, but doesn’t compare to the wrapped in grape leaves method, especially here at the start of grilling season. I really can’t recommend these enough – truly charming finger food. This recipe would probably work on partridge or squab, probably snipe, if they exist.

The more I think about it, the more I’m inclined to wrap everything in grape leaves before grilling – chicken breasts, for sure, but also hamburgers, pork chops, certainly fish (swordfish, halibut, mako shark), and vegetables, but maybe not hot dogs.