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Broiled Sweetbreads
Rub with butter, salt and pepper; wrap in buttered paper, and broil ten minutes. Serve with Maitre d'Hotel butter.
A skeleton recipe of the kind common in books of this era, written for cooks who already knew that sweetbreads arrive at the broiler soaked, blanched and pressed. That preliminary work is the whole job; the broiling is the easy part.
- The step the recipe leaves outSweetbreads must be soaked in several changes of cold water until they run pale, then blanched briefly in acidulated water, cooled, and the membrane and fat peeled away. Broiling a raw sweetbread for ten minutes gives a slack, bloody interior.
- PressingAfter blanching, lay them between two plates or trays with a weight on top and chill for an hour or more. This firms the tissue so it holds together on the grid and gives a flat surface that browns evenly.
- Which sweetbreadThe heart or "kernel" sweetbread of the calf is the round, compact one and the best for broiling. The elongated throat sweetbread is looser and better suited to braising or creaming. Veal is standard; lamb sweetbreads are smaller and cook faster.
- Buttered paperA sheet of paper rubbed with butter, wrapped around the meat to keep it from scorching and drying under direct heat. Parchment does the same thing. Skip it and baste often with melted butter instead, turning once.
- Ten minutesPlausible for a pressed sweetbread of moderate thickness under a hot broiler, turned once, though the recipe specifies neither thickness nor turning. Judge by feel: firm and springy with no softness in the centre, and no pink juice.
- Maitre d'Hotel butterButter creamed with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, served cold in a pat on the hot meat so it melts down. Nothing more complicated is meant.
- Buying and keepingSweetbreads are highly perishable and should be soaked and blanched the day they are bought. Order them ahead from a butcher; they are rarely in a supermarket case.
- YieldFigure one pair for two people as a first course; pair weights vary, veal running from roughly three-quarters of a pound upward before trimming.
Sweetbreads — the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb, never anything to do with bread or sugar — were a standard dish of the late nineteenth-century American table, treated as a delicacy fit for invalids, luncheons and the fashionable creamed entree. The name is old English and its origin is disputed; "sweet" is generally taken to distinguish the mild flavour from stronger offal, and "bread" is often traced to an Old English word for flesh or morsel rather than to the loaf. Their appearance in a general household book like this one, with no explanation of soaking or pressing, shows how routine the preparation still was in a kitchen that broke down whole animals and used every part. The dish faded from ordinary American cooking through the twentieth century as offal moved out of the domestic repertoire, surviving mainly in restaurant kitchens working in the French tradition, where ris de veau never fell out of favour.