Friday, July 11, 2003

At long last sweetbreads. So I’m talking with my mother as I’m cooking dinner.  I’ve already diced the carrots, onions, celery and ham, cooked them slowly in butter with parsley, bay leaf, thyme, salt and pepper for ten minutes, then added (sad gray over-boiled) sweetbreads and let them all cook together, covered, for ten minutes or so.  I have peeled three cucumbers, sliced them lengthwise in half, scooped out their seeds, cut them into large matchsticks, and set them in some white wine vinegar, salt and sugar to sit awhile.  Mother and I are chatting away about this and that – the races in Ruidoso, maybe.  I’m taking the sweetbreads out of the skillet and setting them aside so I can cook down the sauce with some wine. “Shit.  I’m out of vermouth.” “What are making tonight?” my mother asks, knowing, of course, that my copious vermouth consumption is one trait that actually doesn’t indicate that I am a drunk.  “Sweetbreads.” “Oh.”  There’s a considerable silence on the line.  “I can’t believe the stuff you eat.” I’m not worried, though.  Perhaps it’s just the newly bearable weather, or the vodka tonic, but the sweetbreads, gray and shrunken though they are, even though they did not release anything like the “quite a bit of juice” Julia said they would, do not phase me.  It’s going to be fine. I cook down the sauce a little with what vermouth I have plus a little white wine vinegar.  So cavalier.  I pour it over the sweetbreads, which I’ve placed in my handy dandy braising dish.  So serene.  I pour in some Better Than Bouillion© beef broth, bring it to a simmer on the stove top, and stick it in the oven.  Still chatting blithely away with my mother.  I am calm, cool and collected.  I am terribly, terribly ept.  I take another swig of vodka tonic. “Wait a minute,” my mother says, apropos of nothing, “Are you cooking sweetbreads now?” “Sure.” This time a palpable shiver of disgust travels along the phone lines.  “I should let you go, you should be paying attention to that.” Really, I think, she just didn’t want to be hearing my voice while I was handling cow’s glands. “Not really.  It’s in the oven.  Eric’s already got the mushrooms done for the sauce – “ “The oven?” “Sure.  It’s braising.” “Braising??!!!”  Here my mother goes into a near paroxysm of repulsion.  “GOD!  When I had sweetbreads they were fried.  I can’t contemplate eating braised sweetbreads.  They’re so slimy anyway!  Uck uck uck!” Perhaps my mother’s outburst gave me just a wee bit of pause, especially since I was at the time draining cucumber sticks and putting them in a baking dish with green onions and butter to bake for an hour, and especially since I’d discovered we had no rice, so if the Ris de Veau Braises a l’Italienne and the Concombres a la Crème both sucked, we’d be without recourse.  But I quickly regained confidence.  For one thing, my over boiled gray sweetbreads were not remotely slimy.  They might be rubbery, they might be gristly, but they weren’t slimy.  “It’ll be fine.” And do you know what?  It was.  The sweetbreads came out after forty five minutes and were set aside.  I blended into the sauce some cornstarch blended with vermouth, only of course I had no vermouth, so I used water with a splash of white wine vinegar, and some tomato paste, out of the tube I finally bought.  Then I stirred in the mushrooms Eric had diced and I had browned in butter, and some more diced ham.  I let that simmer a bit, stirred in the sweetbreads, and that was that.  Meanwhile I boiled down by half half a cup of cream and, when the cucumbers were done baking, tossed it in with them.  Also I tossed in some parsley there.  And we were done. The sweetbreads were not in the least disgusting.  I couldn’t help wondering what people had been freaking out about.  The taste was rich like liver, only more delicate.  The texture, obviously, after all my abuses, was not what it ought to have been, but that might actually have been for the best for my initial exposure.  They weren’t at all rubbery, but they were more meaty than probably they should have been, with some of liver’s meltingness but not, probably, enough.  With the deep brown sauce flavored with ham and butter and wine and all those nice vegetables, the richness was lovely but not overpowering, and the texture problems mattered less.  This weekend, I hope, Ris de Veau a la Marechale, Creamed Sweetbreads.  I’ll get it right this time.  Cucumbers baked with cream, I got to tell you, are fucking fantastic.  This baking of cucumbers has changed my life, I shall never be the same.  I’ll be one of those moms who puts disgusting looking shit in their kids’ lunchboxes so everyone thinks their freaky little monsters.  But I’ll have baked cucumbers to sustain me.  We spent the balance of the evening watching the Super Retriever semifinal trials in Missoula, Montana.  To watch this show while the freight trucks roar past your Long Island City apartment is to experience an excruciating lesson in everything you’re doing wrong in your life.  You do not have an eager, athletic, well-behaved beautiful retriever.  You do not live in Missoula.  So I just keep thinking “cucumbers, cucumbers, cucumbers” and pray.   8:07:15 AM    comment []