it.

ENTREES OF SWEETBREADS.

_Sweetbreads a la Supreme._--Take two plump sweetbreads, lay them an
hour in strong salt and water, then boil them for ten minutes in fresh
water; put them between two plates to flatten till cold. Cut off all the
gristle and loose skin from underneath; put them to stew _very gently_
in half a pint of good-flavored stock. Take them up, drain well, and
stew them in half a pint of sauce supreme, with a dozen small mushrooms,
for ten minutes.

_Sweetbreads with Oysters._--Prepare the sweetbreads as in the foregoing
recipe, quarter them, and put them in a stewpan with a gill of white
stock, the strained liquor from two dozen oysters, a saltspoonful of
salt, a pinch of pepper, and a suspicion of nutmeg. Put two ounces of
butter in a stewpan over the fire, stir into it one tablespoonful of
fine flour; let them bubble together, stirring the while, one minute.
When the sweetbreads have been simmering twenty minutes, pour the gravy
from them to the sauce; stir quickly till smooth. If thicker than very
thick cream, add a little more stock. In five minutes add the oysters.
Keep _at boiling-point_, but not boiling, till the oysters are firm and
plump. Do not leave them in the sauce a minute beyond this, or they will
begin to shrink. Take them and the sweetbreads up, and if the sauce is
too thin to bear a wineglass of cream, boil it rapidly down till _very
thick_; then skim, and just before pouring over the sweetbreads stir in
a wineglass of thick cream. If it goes in earlier it may curdle.

It has been explained before, but I repeat it here, that there must
never be too much sauce, however good, to any dish, and that the
consistency is most important: it must be thick enough to mask a spoon,
yet run from it freely. Nothing can be worse than a dab of white mush
being served as sauce, unless it be a quantity of thin, milky soup
floating on every plate. This is where the happy medium must be struck.
It is perfectly easy to give exact proportions to produce certain
degrees of thickness, and this has been done in the chapters on sauces;
but where these sauces are used as a medium in which to cook, for
instance, sweetbreads, a certain amount of liquid must be added to
prevent burning. Now it is impossible to say how fast this added liquid
will diminish if the simmering is as slow as it should be, it may lose
hardly at all, in which case the articles stewed must be taken out, and
a few minutes' hard boi