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Larded Sweetbreads
Lard and bake until brown, basting with brown stock. Serve with peas.
Two sentences of instruction that assume you already know the whole of the preliminary work — which, with sweetbreads, is most of the job. Everything the original leaves out is below.
- The step the recipe assumesSweetbreads must be soaked in several changes of cold water until they run pale, then blanched in acidulated water for about 15 minutes, refreshed in ice water, and peeled of membrane and fat. Blanching is what firms them enough to be larded and handled; skinning them raw is a losing game.
- PressingPeriod cookery books frequently direct that blanched sweetbreads be pressed flat between two plates under a weight for an hour or more in the cold; how usual this was in ordinary kitchens is not documented. This gives an even thickness that browns and slices properly. Skip it and the thin edges dry while the centre is still soft.
- What "lard" means hereThreading strips of firm salt pork or fatback through the surface with a larding needle, not smearing them with rendered lard. Chill the pork strips hard before cutting them into 1/8-inch lardoons or they tear rather than draw through. Barding — tying a thin sheet of fat over the top — is the practical substitute if you have no needle.
- Which sweetbreadsVeal thymus (throat) and pancreas (heart) sweetbreads are sold interchangeably; the heart sweetbread is rounder, firmer and better suited to larding and slicing. Order ahead from a butcher and use them within a day of purchase, as they spoil quickly.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given. In a moderate oven, around 350°F, roughly 20 to 25 minutes will brown the lardoons and heat a pressed sweetbread through. Cook them through — variety meats are generally recommended to reach 160°F internally — but no further, or they turn dense and grainy.
- Brown stockA dark veal or beef stock made from roasted bones, unsalted and reduced enough to have body. Baste at intervals as it browns; the pan juices left at the end, reduced by half and mounted with a little butter, will make a sauce, though the recipe itself mentions none.
- Yield and servingOne veal sweetbread — about 3/4 to 1 lb before trimming — serves two as a main course. The recipe says only "serve with peas" and specifies nothing further about them.
Sweetbreads sat in an odd position in turn-of-the-century American cooking: cheap enough to appear in economical household manuals, delicate enough to be treated as a company dish, and awkward enough that books of this kind often printed several variations — braised, creamed, broiled, in croquettes, in patty shells — frequently in the compressed shorthand you see here, apparently on the assumption that the soaking, blanching and pressing had been covered under a general heading. Larding itself is much older, a medieval and early-modern solution to lean meat that persisted in professional kitchens after home cooks largely abandoned it; larding needles were listed among the equipment of a well-furnished kitchen of the period and had become uncommon in home kitchens by the mid-twentieth century. The pairing with peas is a convention of the period rather than an inspiration, and it appears in French menu language as ris de veau aux petits pois. American appetite for offal declined after the Second World War, which is why a dish that needed no explanation then needs seven notes now.