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Fried Sweetbreads
Roll in fine bread crumbs, egg, and a second time in crumbs, and fry in deep fat or sauté in a little fat. -Mrs. Granlees.
A one-line recipe of the sort that assumes the cook already knows how to prepare sweetbreads. Everything that matters happens before the breading.
- The step that is missingThe recipe begins at the breading, but sweetbreads must first be soaked, blanched and pressed. Soak in several changes of cold water for an hour or two until they lose their pinkness, simmer 15-20 minutes in salted acidulated water, then plunge into ice water, peel away the membrane and fat, and press between two plates under a weight until cold and firm. Breaded raw, they collapse into a soft grey mass in the pan.
- What a sweetbread isThe thymus (throat) and pancreas (heart or belly) glands of a calf or lamb, not any part of the reproductive system. Heart sweetbreads are rounder, firmer and more prized; throat sweetbreads are ragged and cheaper. A butcher will need notice.
- SlicingOnce pressed, cut into slices about half an inch thick, or leave small lobes whole. Uneven thickness is the main cause of a soggy centre under a browned crust.
- The breading order"Crumbs, egg, and a second time in crumbs" reads oddly. The likely reason is that a light dusting first gives the beaten egg something to grip, so the coating does not slide off the moist gland, though the recipe does not say so. A modern cook would substitute flour for the first crumbing to the same effect. No seasoning is specified; season the crumbs.
- Fat temperatureDeep fat should be 350-375F. Since the sweetbreads are already cooked through, you are only browning the crust, which takes two to three minutes. Sautéing in a shallow pan of clarified butter is the gentler route and browns more evenly.
- Timing and holdingBlanched sweetbreads keep pressed and covered in the refrigerator for a day, and are easier to slice cold. Breaded ones should be fried within an hour or the crumbs go pasty.
- YieldA pair of veal sweetbreads may weigh around a pound and will serve three or four as a main course, more as an entrée, though the recipe states no quantity. Serve immediately, with lemon, a tomato sauce or a mushroom cream sauce.
Sweetbreads sat squarely in the middle of the American middle-class table around 1900, neither exotic nor cheap, and cookbooks of the period print many treatments of them: braised, creamed, in patty shells, larded and roasted, or, as here, crumbed and fried. The name is old and its origin is disputed; it is often traced to "bread" in an obsolete sense of a piece or morsel of roast meat, with "sweet" distinguishing the mild-tasting gland from other offal, but this is not settled. The brevity of Mrs. Granlees's contribution may itself be informative: community-cookbook contributions of this kind often record only the step the contributor thought of as hers, apparently assuming a reader who knew to soak, blanch and press. Sweetbreads fell out of ordinary American cooking after mid-century, a shift usually linked to the general retreat from organ meats and to the narrowing of butcher-counter supply.