Parboil the sweetbreads; drain. Put in the baking-pan with a piece of salt pork, 1 onion, 1 carrot, 1 bay-leaf and a sprig of thyme, all cut fine. Sprinkle with pepper, dredge with flour; add ½ cup of stock. Let cook in the oven until done. Serve with mushrooms.
A compressed version of the classic French braise of sweetbreads on a bed of aromatics. The original assumes you know how to handle the gland before it ever reaches the pan, which is where most of the work lies.
- The hinge: soak and press firstSweetbreads should be soaked in several changes of cold water, or lightly salted water, for a few hours until they turn pale and release their blood. After parboiling (10-15 minutes in barely simmering water), plunge them into cold water, peel away the outer membrane and gristle, then press between two plates with a weight for an hour. Unpressed sweetbreads braise into a loose, spongy texture rather than the firm slice the dish is built on.
- Which sweetbreadVeal sweetbreads come in two parts: the heart (or stomach) sweetbread, the pancreas, which is rounder and more even, and the throat sweetbread, the thymus, which is stringier and cheaper. Either works, but buy them very fresh or frozen, and use within a day of thawing.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A braise of this kind wants a moderate oven, 325-350F, for roughly 30-40 minutes, basting once or twice. Higher heat will dry the surface before the aromatics have given anything up.
- The salt porkSalt pork here is unsmoked pork side or fatback cured in salt, not smoked bacon. Rinse it and cut it small so it renders into the vegetables. Unsmoked pancetta or blanched slab bacon is the nearest substitute; if you use smoked bacon the dish tastes of smoke rather than of sweetbread.
- The vegetables are a mirepoixOnion, carrot, bay and thyme "cut fine" is a bed, not a garnish. Spread it under the sweetbreads so they steam over it. Strain the pan juices at the end and reduce them briefly if they are thin.
- Stock quantityHalf a cup is 4 fl oz, and it is deliberately little — this is a braise that finishes nearly dry, glazing the meat. Use a shallow pan close in size to the sweetbreads or the liquid will evaporate before they are done. Veal or light chicken stock, not beef.
- No salt in the listThe recipe seasons with pepper only, on the assumption that the salt pork carries the dish. Taste the juices before serving and correct.
- The mushroomsServe with means cooked separately: button mushrooms sauteed in butter, or stewed in a little stock and folded into the strained pan juices. Do not add them at the start of the braise, where they will water the sauce.
- YieldA pair of veal sweetbreads, about 1 to 1 1/4 lb before trimming, serves four as a first course or two generously as a main.
Braised sweetbreads with a mirepoix and salt pork — ris de veau braise — were standard bourgeois French cooking through the nineteenth century. The daily-dish format of the book flattens it to a few lines and expects the reader to supply the rest, which tells you how routine offal cookery still was in a household kitchen: sweetbreads, brains, tripe and kidneys were cheap. The name "sweetbread" is of uncertain origin, generally traced to an older sense of bread meaning a morsel or piece of flesh, with "sweet" distinguishing it from the strong-tasting organs; the glands themselves are the thymus and the pancreas, the heart sweetbread being the pancreas.