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Fried Sweetbreads
Sweetbreads Egg Breadcrumbs Crisco Peas or new Potatoes Rich brown gravy Sweetbreads should always be blanched before using. To blanch, soak in cold water two hours, changing water 3 or 4 times. Put into saucepan, cover with cold water, add little salt, and skim well as water comes to boil. Simmer from ten to thirty minutes, according to kind of sweetbread used. Remove to basin of cold water until cold, or wash well in cold water and press between two plates till cold. Dry, remove skin, cut in slices, coat with beaten egg and toss in breadcrumbs, and fry in hot Crisco to a golden brown. Serve round peas or new potatoes, with rich brown gravy.
For those whose digestions are at fault, sweetbreads ought to be eaten as a daily ration if the pocketbook will afford it. For this special part of the animal's anatomy is that one of all the viscera whose mission is to help digestion. It is of the very pancreas itself, that stomach gland of marvelously involved structure which elaborates the powerful pancreatic juice. It is alkaline in nature, able to digest starches, fats, and most of what escapes digestion in the stomach proper. It received its name from a fancied resemblance in its substance and formation to the rising lumps of dough destined for bread.
A straightforward crumbed-and-fried offal dish from a Crisco-sponsored cookbook of 1915. The soaking and blanching are not optional steps and everything else depends on them.
- Blanching is the hingeSweetbreads are dense with blood and enclosed in membrane; without the long cold soak and the blanch they cook grey, taste metallic, and will not peel. Change the water until it runs clear rather than counting the changes, then blanch, chill, and only then strip the skin.
- Press them coldThe instruction to press between two plates until cold is what makes neat slices that hold their coating. Weight the top plate with a can or two and refrigerate an hour; slices from an unpressed sweetbread fall apart in the pan.
- "According to kind of sweetbread"Butchers sold two: the heart or stomach sweetbread (the pancreas, larger and irregular) and the throat sweetbread (the thymus, longer and lobed). The thymus needs nearer ten minutes at a bare simmer, the pancreas nearer twenty to thirty. The book does not say which animal is meant, though veal is the likeliest; lamb sweetbreads are smaller and quicker still.
- CriscoShortening, introduced in 1911, four years before this book. Any neutral fat with a high smoke point does the same job; clarified butter gives a better flavour. Fry at 350-375F so the crumb colours in two or three minutes a side, the interior already being cooked.
- Buy them fresh and cook them the same dayOffal spoils faster than muscle meat. Sweetbreads should smell clean and look pale pink, and most butchers now need them ordered. Begin the soak the moment they come home.
- YieldOne pair of veal sweetbreads (roughly 1 lb before trimming) serves two as a main course, three or four as a first course. Reckon on losing a quarter of the weight to membrane and trimming.
- The digestive claim is wrongThe closing paragraph argues that eating the pancreas supplies pancreatic juice. Digestive enzymes are proteins and are destroyed by blanching, frying, and stomach acid alike; pancreatic enzyme therapy uses enteric-coated preparations for exactly that reason. Eat sweetbreads because they are good, not as medicine.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which appeared in 1911 — which is why a shortening is named as an ingredient here alongside eggs and breadcrumbs. Sweetbreads were familiar middle-class fare in 1915 and delicate enough to be considered invalid cookery, which is the register the closing paragraph is written in: the conviction that an organ could pass on its function to the person who ate it. The etymology given is one of several traditional guesses; the bread element has often been traced to an old word for flesh or roast meat rather than to loaves, and the sweet to the mild flavour compared with liver or kidney, though the derivation remains uncertain. Neither the thymus nor the pancreas has anything to do with baking.