Clean and parboil the sweetbreads; then fry 1 small sliced onion in hot fat until light brown. Stir in 1 tablespoonful of flour; add ½ cup of water and ½ cup of wine vinegar; let boil up. Add 1 bay-leaf, a few cloves, ¼ cup of seeded raisins, a few thin slices of lemon and chopped parsley. Season with salt and paprica to taste; add 1 tablespoonful of brown sugar. Let boil; add the sweetbreads and simmer until done. Serve cold.
A sweet-sour braise in the German-Jewish süss-sauer manner, written for a cook who already knew how to handle sweetbreads. The quantities for the sauce are given; the quantity of meat is not.
- How much meatThe recipe names no quantity of meat and no yield; the sauce as written would suit roughly a pound of sweetbreads. Veal sweetbreads are what a butcher will usually supply (the throat gland is thymus, the heart sweetbread pancreas); lamb are smaller and cook faster.
- Clean and parboil, in detailThis is the hinge. Soak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water for two or three hours to draw the blood, then simmer 12 to 15 minutes, plunge into ice water, and peel away the outer membrane and any gristle. Pressing them flat between two plates under a weight for an hour firms them for slicing before they go into the sauce.
- The fatThe recipe says only "hot fat." In a kosher kitchen that would mean schmaltz (rendered chicken or goose fat) or a neutral oil rather than butter, since the dish is meat.
- PapricaPaprika. Sweet Hungarian is right here; hot paprika will overwhelm the vinegar-and-sugar balance.
- The vinegarHalf a cup of wine vinegar against half a cup of water is sharp by modern taste, and the tablespoon of brown sugar and the raisins are what pulls it back. Taste before the sweetbreads go in and adjust with sugar rather than diluting, or the sauce will not have enough body to glaze.
- "A few cloves"Three or four whole cloves is plenty for this volume; six will take over. Fish out the bay leaf and cloves before serving.
- Simmer until doneBecause the sweetbreads were already parboiled, 15 to 20 minutes at a bare simmer is enough to take up the sauce. Long cooking makes them grainy and dry.
- Serve coldMeant seriously. Cool the sweetbreads in the sauce so they absorb it, then refrigerate; the liquid thickens slightly on chilling. Serve sliced, with the raisins and lemon spooned over, as a cold appetiser or part of a Shabbat lunch prepared the day before.
Sweet-and-sour braises built on vinegar, sugar or honey, raisins and lemon run through Ashkenazi cooking from the Rhineland eastward, and turn up applied to almost everything: tongue, carp, meatballs, cabbage, pot roast. The pairing is generally traced to medieval German and Italian cookery, where sugar and vinegar together were standard for meat sauces, and it survived in Jewish kitchens long after gentile European cooking had moved on. That the dish is served cold is often explained in practical terms: a cold sweet-sour dish can be cooked before sundown on Friday and eaten at Saturday lunch without reheating, though this is a traditional rationalisation rather than documented practice. A calendar book offering dishes of all nations was following an early twentieth-century American publishing fashion for cosmopolitan menus, and the label "Jewish" here stands in for what would more precisely be German-Jewish home cooking.