Sweetbreads
Put them in cold water; remove the pipes and membranes. Cook them in boiling salted water, with one tablespoonful of lemon juice, twenty minutes, and plunge into cold water to harden. They may then be cooked in either of the following ways:
This is the base preparation every other sweetbread recipe in the book assumes — soak, peel, blanch, chill. Done properly it firms the gland so it can be sliced, breaded or braised without collapsing.
- The hinge: the cold plungePlunging the blanched sweetbreads straight into cold water, as the recipe directs, firms them and makes them sliceable. Skip it and they stay slack and hard to trim.
- Soak longer than the recipe implies"Put them in cold water" means a long soak, ideally two to three hours with several changes of water, or overnight refrigerated. This draws out blood; grey, blood-streaked sweetbreads look and taste worse.
- What you are buyingButchers sell veal or lamb heart (or stomach) sweetbreads -- the pancreas, the round lobe -- and throat sweetbreads -- the thymus, the elongated one. The round heart breads are firmer and better for slicing. Order ahead; they are rarely on display.
- Pipes and membranesThe connective tissue peels most easily after blanching, not before, though large ducts should come out at the soaking stage. Work with fingers and the tip of a knife rather than pulling hard, which tears the lobes.
- Twenty minutes is for a large veal pairLamb sweetbreads or small pieces need 8 to 12 minutes in barely simmering water. A hard boil for the full twenty minutes will leave them spongy. Keep the water at a bare tremble.
- The lemon juiceAcid keeps them pale and helps firm the surface. The recipe's single tablespoonful is for an unspecified quantity of water; much beyond that begins to taste of it.
- Press themAfter chilling, sweetbreads are often laid between two plates with a weight on top for an hour in the refrigerator. This gives even thickness for frying or slicing.
- Buy and use quicklySweetbreads are highly perishable — cook within 24 hours of purchase and keep them cold throughout the soak. Once blanched and chilled they hold a day or two in the refrigerator.
- YieldA pair of veal sweetbreads runs roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb before trimming and serves three or four as a main course.
Sweetbreads from a calf or lamb — the thymus and pancreas, and nothing to do with bread in the sense of a loaf — were standard middle-class company food in Britain and America through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, which is why a book like this treats the blanching as a base technique with a menu of finishes hung off it: creamed, breaded and fried, in patty shells, with peas. The name is old, said to appear in English by the sixteenth century, and its origin is conjectural: the "bread" element is usually traced to a sense of morsel or piece of flesh, while the "sweet" is often explained by the mild, rich taste as against muscle meat. Their fall from the domestic repertoire in the later twentieth century had less to do with taste than with supply and squeamishness: as butchering moved out of neighborhood shops, the glands stopped being a routine byproduct a housewife could ask for and became a special order, and they now read as restaurant cooking rather than Tuesday dinner.