French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [219]
Lamb’s sweetbreads (ris d’agneau) are prepared in much the same way but are used mainly as part of the garnish for a vol-au-vent à la toulousaine , à /a financière and so on.
RIS DE VEAU À LA CRÈME AUX CHAMPIGNONS
VEAL SWEETBREADS WITH CREAM AND MUSHROOMS
So many ambitious sauces and garnishes can be served with sweetbreads and so few of them come up to expectations that I would never willingly order them in a restaurant. But once, at Barattero’s at Lamastre in the Ardèche, Madame announced that there was ris de veau à la crème for dinner and that was that. One did not argue. The dish proved to be a very high-class one and I was grateful to be shown how good sweetbreads could really be. I cannot pretend that the recipe which follows is the Barattero one; I can only say that it is in the same manner, and that it is good.
Ingredients for two people are a pair of sweetbreads already prepared as above; 2 thin slices of back pork fat; an onion, 2 carrots, a couple of sprigs of parsley; white wine and water or mild clear veal or chicken stock. For the sauce, 2 oz. of mushrooms, butter, pint of thick cream. Fried bread for the garnish.
Wrap each prepared and pressed sweetbread in a slice of the larding fat and tie it with thin string. Slice the onion and carrots and put them in the bottom of a pan in which the sweetbreads will just fit and which will go in the oven. On top of the vegetables put the sweetbreads. Pour in a small glass of white wine, set the pan on the fire and cook until the wine gently bubbles. Add water just to cover the sweetbreads; season; bring the water to simmering point; cover the pan; transfer to a low oven and leave with the liquid just barely murmuring for 45 minutes to an hour. If you have good stock, the wine can be dispensed with and the sweetbreads covered straight away with the stock.
Wash and dry the mushrooms, quarter them, stalks included, then cut each quarter into little chunks. Fry them gently in a small piece of butter until the juices run. In more butter fry 2 thick slices of French bread, the outer crust trimmed off. Keep them warm.
Take the sweetbreads from the oven; untie the wrappings. Put them into a frying or sauté pan in which 1 oz. of butter is just barely bubbling; let them take colour on each side, but very gently. They must be the palest gold, but not brown. Add the mushrooms and 2 tablespoons of the liquid in which the sweetbreads have cooked. Pour in the cream, turn up the heat, shake and rotate the pan until the cream thickens. If it gets too solid add a little more liquid. Put the sweetbreads on top of the fried bread in the serving dish. Give the sauce another quick stir over the fire. Pour it round the sweetbreads and serve.
And now you see what I mean about sweetbreads being a trouble to prepare. Although, of course, half a dozen are not all that much more bother than two. If they are to be done at all, however, let them be done properly. As Madame Seignobos observes rather pointedly in an early twentieth-century book called Comment on Forme une Cuisinière, ‘in certain backward countries, sweetbreads are cooked without a previous steeping and blanching; this faulty procedure deprives the sweetbread of the delicacy which is its principal merit.’
RIS DE VEAU À L’OSEILLE
VEAL SWEETBREADS WITH SORREL
This, says Madame Seignobos in Comment on Forme une Cuisinière, is a traditional dish of real old French cookery. The sweetbreads, prepared and cooked in a stock as above, are gently fried in butter; some of the cooking liquid is added and, when the sweetbreads are bronzed and glazed in their juice, you serve them on a purée of sorrel and you sprinkle over the juice to which you must add some