Home › Meats › Creamed Sweetbreads
Creamed Sweetbreads
Cut in small pieces and serve in a white sauce, on toast or on toast patties, or in puff paste or as a vol-au-vent.
This is an assembly note rather than a full recipe: the book assumes you have already bought, soaked, blanched and pressed your sweetbreads, as any cook of the period would have. Everything that matters happens before the line quoted here.
- What the recipe leaves outRaw sweetbreads must be soaked in several changes of cold water until they run pale, then simmered gently 15-20 minutes in salted, acidulated water, cooled, and peeled of membrane and fat. Only then are they cut up and warmed in sauce. Skipping the soak leaves them bloody-tasting and grey.
- PressingMany period cookbooks direct that, between blanching and slicing, the sweetbreads be laid flat between two plates with a weight on top for an hour or more in the cold. This firms them so they cut into neat pieces instead of crumbling into the sauce.
- What a sweetbread isThe thymus gland (throat sweetbread) and pancreas (heart or belly sweetbread) of a calf or lamb, not a bread and not a gland anyone bakes. Veal thymus is the prized one; expect to order it from a butcher rather than find it on a supermarket shelf.
- White sauceA basic bechamel: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk or half milk and half the blanching liquid, cooked until the flour taste is gone. Season with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg; some period recipes finish with a little cream and a spoonful of sherry.
- Toast patties and vol-au-ventA toast patty is a thick slice of bread hollowed into a shallow case and toasted or fried; a vol-au-vent is a tall puff-pastry shell. Frozen puff pastry shells stand in for both and are the least troublesome route.
- Heat, not cookingThe sweetbreads are already cooked at this stage. Fold them into the hot sauce and warm through for two or three minutes only; longer and the texture turns from creamy to rubbery.
- FreshnessSweetbreads are highly perishable offal. Use them within a day of purchase, keep them cold throughout the soaking, and discard any that smell sour.
- YieldA pound of veal sweetbreads yields roughly 12 ounces trimmed, enough for four served in pastry shells as a first course or lunch dish.
Creamed sweetbreads were a standing feature of American genteel cookery from roughly the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth, the sort of thing served at luncheons, at wedding breakfasts and to invalids, and they turn up in many general household manuals of the period. The brevity of this entry is itself informative: the compiler expected the reader already to know the soaking and pressing routine, and needed only to list the fashionable ways of presenting the result. Sweetbreads occupied an odd position, being cheap offal in principle but delicate, laborious and quickly spoiled in practice, which made them a mark of a well-run kitchen. They largely disappeared from home cooking in the later twentieth century, though the reasons are a matter of speculation rather than record.