Blanch the sweetbreads and sprinkle with salt and pepper; then cut into thin slices. Dip in beaten egg and roll in grated Swiss cheese and fine bread-crumbs and fry in a little hot butter to a golden brown. Serve hot, garnished with parsley.
A terse nineteenth-century sketch that assumes you already know how to prepare sweetbreads. The frying is trivial; everything that determines whether the dish works happens before the pan comes out.
- "Blanch" means more than a dipFor sweetbreads this is the whole hinge of the recipe: soak them in several changes of cold water for two to three hours to draw out blood, then poach at a bare simmer for about 15 minutes, cool in cold water, and peel off the membrane and any gristle. Press the cleaned lobes flat between two plates with a weight for an hour or more in the refrigerator; unpressed sweetbreads will not slice cleanly.
- Which sweetbreadThe recipe does not say, but veal sweetbreads are the usual assumption. They come as an elongated "throat" sweetbread (the thymus) and a rounder "heart" or stomach sweetbread (the pancreas); the heart one is the better for slicing. Lamb sweetbreads work but are small and fiddly; count on ordering either from a butcher.
- Slice thickness"Thin slices" probably means something around 1/4 inch — thick enough to hold the crust, thin enough to heat through before the coating darkens. Slice while still cold from pressing.
- Swiss cheeseIn a book of this period this meant Emmental or Gruyère, not the processed slices sold under the name now. Grate it fine on a rasp; a coarse grate sheds in the pan. Mix roughly equal parts cheese and dry breadcrumbs so the cheese is anchored.
- The butter will burnCheese in a coating browns fast and butter alone smokes before the crust sets. Use clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, over medium heat, and reckon two to three minutes a side to a deep gold.
- Quantity and yieldNo amounts are given. One pair of veal sweetbreads, about 1 lb before trimming, feeds two to three as a first course; allow one egg and roughly 1/2 cup each of grated cheese and crumbs.
- Sourcing noteBSE controls have at various times restricted thymus from older cattle in the UK and elsewhere; in practice what is sold is from young calves. Buy from a butcher who can tell you the age, use within a day, and keep it very cold until it goes in the water.
Sweetbreads appear regularly in European and American cookbooks through the nineteenth century — mild and tender, and familiar enough that this one spends no words defending them. The "Swiss" label in a book of this kind rarely points to a specific regional dish; it is shorthand for the cheese, the way a recipe becomes "Italian" the moment tomato appears. What is arguably Swiss about it is the use of hard Alpine cheese, Emmental or Gruyère, as a crumb coating rather than a melting sauce. Day-by-day almanac cookbooks like this seem to have been a fashionable late-Victorian and Edwardian format: one dish for every date, each tagged with a nation, sparing the household cook the daily question of what to serve.