Sweetbreads Taillevent

Tom had a birthday recently. Between a festive dinner in a restaurant or one at home, he chose home (where properly aged wines don’t cost a fortune). He asked for sweetbreads en croûte. I knew this would put me on my mettle. Tom still dreams about one of the best meals of his life, at Taillevent in Paris, in 2007, where his main course was a heavenly Chausson feuilleté de ris de veau, sauce mousseuse à l’oseille. We still have the menu we brought home that evening, signed by the proprietor, Jean-Claude Vrinat, and his chef, Alain Solivérès.

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We both knew there was no way I could equal that fabulous dish. But I went looking in my cookbooks, and imagine my pleasure at finding a recipe in Raymond Oliver’s La Cuisine called Sweetbreads Taillevent. It was not as elaborate as the restaurant’s dish – which was a mercy! Perhaps it was an earlier version. Oliver and Vrinat were contemporaries and friends, so it may have been meant as homage. In any event, the recipe looked appropriately festive, and it was not really difficult to make, except for the pastry crust.

I’ve always made puff pastry from a Julia Child recipe that’s very different from Oliver’s – slightly in ingredients, largely in technique. Hence, I could see this would be an interesting experiment. As a kindness to my readers who have minimal interest in comparative puff pastry making, I’ll discuss those technicalities at the end of this post. On to the sweetbreads!

We agreed that Tom would take the lead in preparing the sweetbreads while I focused on the pastry. (I was also doing a soufflé for dessert.) So this was very much a cooperative endeavor.

In the elaborate French manner, the sweetbreads had to be soaked for two hours, bits of fat and membrane cut off, soaked again, and blanched. A charming way to spend the afternoon of one’s birthday, n’est ce pas?! But from there it was not much different from a standard braise. Cut carrots, onions, mushrooms in julienne strips; simmer them in butter in a covered pan; add the sweetbreads and white wine, cover, and simmer for half an hour.

Then remove the sweetbreads and vegetables to a plate, reduce the pan juices, and add an outrageous amount of crème fraiche – a whole cupful for just the two of us. (Oh, those French!) Reduce that somewhat and set the sauce aside.

Meanwhile, there I was, attempting to make an attractive pastry case for the sweetbreads. I was cutting back a recipe for four, which gave me a lot of arithmetical exercise to calculate what size of a round pastry shell would equal half the volume of an eight-inch square shell. As I’ve said before in this blog, numbers are not my friends! Here’s what I came up with:

I must confess that never in my life has a baked puff pastry case risen for me the way the recipes say they will. This day’s was no exception. It didn’t behave horribly, but it was no very beautiful thing. And when we filled it with the sweetbreads and their sauce, placed its pastry lid on top, and set it on a serving plate, it looked like nothing so much as a poorly constructed flying saucer.

Still, the whole dish tasted just lovely. The pastry was crisp and angelically buttery; the sweetbreads were luscious; the crème fraiche had managed to absorb itself almost entirely into the other components. Alongside, we served spinach seethed in butter (as if the dish needed more butter!) and braised black trumpet mushrooms.

We were happy. And we learned something. We’ve always thought that the French were over-fastidious about sweetbreads, that all that soaking and blanching wasn’t really necessary. Italians don’t do it, and Italian sweetbread recipes have an attractive earthiness. This dish showed us that, while those steps may not be necessary, they do have a point. They firm the texture and etherealize the flavor, making sweetbreads very compatible, very easily integrated, with ingredients like the mushrooms and crème fraiche – and that, we can say on the basis of this recipe, is not a bad thing at all.

Here’s the birthday celebrant, trying to decide whether to drink the white wine we’d had with the first course – a 2009 Chablis premier cru – or the red wine he’d chosen for the sweetbreads – a 1990 Gevrey Chambertin. (He drank both.) Happy birthday, Tom!

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Postscript on the puff pastry

In the past I’ve always made the “simple puff pastry” recipe from Julia Child’s Mastering, volume 2. This, when ready to use, consists of 72 layers of butter alternating with 73 layers of dough, which was impressive enough for me. For the birthday dish I decided to follow Oliver’s classic recipe, which results in – I kid you not – 729 layers of butter alternating with 730 layers of dough.

During all the folding and rolling and turning this requires, Oliver cautions, “It is very important that the butter not break through the dough at any time” and “it absolutely must not ooze out.” Well, fine, but I wish he’d also said how to prevent that, because I couldn’t. And since he regards a breakthrough as inconceivable, he doesn’t suggest any way to remedy it. So I struggled along, poking the butter back in and plastering over the breaks with flour.

Eventually I achieved a 5-inch-high brick of 1,459-layer dough. Then came the hardest part of the job: rolling it out to a thickness of ⅛ inch. That took a lot of time and muscle power – so much that I wonder if I worked the dough too hard, causing the pastry case not to rise as high as it should have in the baking. But, as I said above, the taste and texture were perfectly good, so I was content. I think I’ll stick to Julia’s recipe in the future, though.