Sweetbread pastries

(Recipe #19, page 122)

One veal sweetbread will serve 4 to 5 people. Place sweetbread over fire in cold water. Once sweetbread is warmed, please in cold water, remove skin. Brown with several finely chopped shallots in butter, and white bread soaked in cold bouillon or water and pressed to remove liquid. Add three eggs, of which the whites of half have been beaten foamy, add lemons, and a generous portion of fresh butter that has been beaten till creamy. As desired, stir in several cleaned and chopped anchovies. One may also add several oysters with their broth.

Pastry is filled before baking. Bake as noted in the first recipe for small pies and pastries.

Fancy veal pie with sweetbread dumplings

(Recipe #8, page 120)

Bake a top crust of puff paste as for the wildfowl pie. At the same time, prepare the veal fricassee with sweetbread dumplings described in the meat section; the preparation of the dumplings is described in the section on dumplings (XIV, no. 7). Place the fricassee in a deep dish, cover with the baked crust, and bring it to the table piping hot.

Translated by David Green.

Roast duck

(Recipe #148, page 114)

The duck may be roasted stuffed or unstuffed. Use quartered apples and currants to stuff the duck, or better take finely chopped heart, lungs, liver, and stomach (with its membrane removed), adding creamed butter half the size of an egg, 2 eggs, ⅓ pound of wheat bread soaked in cold water and well pressed, nutmeg, and salt. Or following English practice fill the cavity with onions, sage, rue, and salt.

Translated by David Green.

Fine ragout of young spring chickens and pigeons

(Recipe #144, pages 112 – 113)

4 chickens or 8 pigeons will serve 12. Prepare them as in no. 143 and stew them in butter until done. Brown a knob of fresh butter the size of an egg, add flour and stir until it also brown, but do not let it scorch. Stir the browned flour with the flavorful broth in which the birds were cooked, adding brown stock as necessary, a sliced seeded lemon, some ground nutmeg, pepper, and salt.

Turkey with forcemeat

(Recipe #138, pages 110 – 111)

To make the stuffing, take ¾ pound of chopped veal without gristle, ¾ pound of streaky pork also finely chopped, ½ cup melted butter, 3 eggs (the whites of 2 beaten to a froth and added at the end), 2 pounds of 2-day old white bread soaked in cold water and squeezed out, ½ ounce of cleaned and chopped morels, 4 veal sweetbreads cooked until half done and with the membrane removed distributed through the mixture, salt, nutmeg, mushrooms or capers, and finely chopped parsley.

Stuff this forcemeat into the crop and body cavity of the turkey and roast it as above or braise it as described in section I, no. 52.

Note: Stuffed in this manner, a turkey will feed a large group and can be brought to the table hot or cold.

Translated by David Green.

Hen turkey in a fricassee sauce (first or middle course)

(Recipe #139, page 111)

Prepare the turkey as for roasting; the legs can be inserted into the skin as directed in section I. Then set the turkey on the stove with cold butter and some shallots, brown it slowly covered, add some boiling meat stock or water along with lemon peel (yellow skin only), mace, some estragon, and ½ hour later a large number of mushrooms; simmer tightly covered in scant broth until tender.

Have some strong meat broth ready; ½ hour before serving, add lightly browned flour along with sweetbreads, stuffed crayfish heads, pistachios, asparagus, or cauliflower (see section I, no. 17, etc.). Boil the gravy until everything is tender but not disintegrating, skim the fat from the turkey gravy, and add the boiled gravy—which like any fricassee gravy must be well bound—along with a few seeded lemon slices. Stir in 2 egg yolks and crayfish butter and set the turkey out, garnished with dumplings of white bread, veal, or suet just boiled in salted water. Pass slices of puff pastry as a substitute for vols-au-vent.

Translated by David Green.

Fancy veal fricassee with sweetbread dumplings

(Recipe #63, page 91)

Prepare a fancy veal fricassee without sweetbreads and sausages, make sweetbread dumplings as described in the section on dumplings (XIV, no. 7), cook them in meat broth, and place them in the fricassee when serving it.

Translated by David Green.

Fancy veal fricassee

(Recipe #62, pages 90 – 91)

Cut veal breast into small squares; to assure that the meat stays quite white, blanch it: after washing it in cold water, place it on the heat and just before the water comes to a boil dump the meat in cold water and dry it. Then place the pieces in a kettle with a generous amount of very hot fresh butter; simmer the meat slowly tightly covered for about ¼ hour, turning it once, but do not let it brown.

Kohlrabi

(Recipe #21, page 55)

Peel and wash the bulbous stems, then cut them into strips or slices, removing all tough portions. Cook until tender in boiling salted water. Then make a roux with melted butter or suet, add fresh milk or meat stock to taste, along with nutmeg and salt, and stew the kohlrabi. If the kohlrabi were harvested young, the heart leaves can be sliced thin and boiled separately, mixed with butter and meat stock, and placed as a garnish around the kohlrabi, stewed and served like cauliflower. If the leaves are no longer tender enough, surround the kohlrabi with sausages or sliced sweetbreads and serve with cutlets, meat patties, roulades, or meatballs.

Preparation time will be about 1½ hours.

Note: Blue kohlrabi is preferable to white kohlrabi; it is milder and doesn’t become moldy as easily as the white.

Translated by David Green.

Sweetbread soup

(Recipe #12, page 30)

The sweetbread (calf’s sweetbread) is prepared as in Chapter One, General Preliminary Remarks and Definitions of Terms, cubed and cooked in butter and flour until yellow, then cooked for awhile in veal broth, then stirring in finely chopped parsley, mace, and egg yolks. This is also a soup that is suitable for the ill; in that case one must omit the spices, and the flour should be sweated with only a little butter.

[Note: Sweetbread consists of the gullet, neck, heart, liver, sometimes even the cheek, ear, “sublingual glands” of the tongue, and even the testicles. My mother always called these the innards.]