Sweet-Breads
These are great delicacies. There are two in a calf, one from neck called "throat sweet-bread," the other from near the heart called "heart sweet-bread." The latter is most delicate. Select the largest. The color should be clear and a shade darker than the fat. Before cooking let the sweet-breads lie for half an hour in luke-warm water, then throw into boiling water to blanch and harden, and then into cold water to cool; after which draw off the outer casing, remove the little pipes, and cut into thin slices. Sweetbreads do not keep well, and should be fresh, and must be kept in a cold, dry place. They should be thoroughly cooked. In larding sweet-bread, take deep, long stitches, or they will break out.
To broil, prepare as above, spread plenty of butter over them, and broil on a gridiron over hot coals, turning often.
To fricassee, cut up the remnant of a cooked sweet-bread in small pieces, prepare a gravy by melting two table-spoons butter and stirring in a table-spoon flour, and adding a tea-cup of soup stock or water; lay pieces of sweet-bread in pan with gravy, season with pepper and salt, and boil up once. Garnish with sliced lemon or pieces of fried bread. If sweet-breads are fresh, cut into thin slices, let simmer slowly in the gravy for three-quarters of an hour, and add a well-beaten egg, two table-spoons cream, and a spoonful chopped parsley; stir all together for a few minutes, and serve immediately.
To fry, parboil five minutes, wipe dry, lard with narrow strips of salt fat pork with a larding-needle, put a very little butter or lard into a frying-pan, lay in the sweet-breads when it is hot, and fry to a crisp brown, turning often. Or, slice thin, sprinkle over grated nutmeg and chopped parsley, dip into a batter made of one cup milk, one egg, one cup of flour, a pinch of salt, and a half tea spoon baking-powder, and fry like fritters.
To roast, parboil large ones, and, when cold, lard with salt pork as above. Roast brown in a moderate oven, basting often with butter and water. Serve with white sauce or tomato sauce poured over them. For sweet-breads with green pease, lard five sweet-breads with strips of salt pork (project evenly about half an inch on the upper side), put on the fire with a half pint water, and let stew slowly for half an hour, take out and put in a small dripping-pan with a little butter and a sprinkle of flour; brown slightly, add half a gill of mingled milk and water, and season with pepper; heat a half pint of cream, and stir it in the gravy in the pan. Have pease ready boiled and seasoned, place the sweet-breads in the center of the dish, pour the gravy over them, and put pease around them.
A cluster of methods rather than one recipe, and nearly all of them depend on the same first step. Get the soaking, blanching and peeling right and everything that follows is straightforward.
- Which gland is whichThe "heart sweet-bread" is the pancreas, plump and rounded; the "throat sweet-bread" is the thymus, longer and more lobed. Butchers now usually sell the pancreas as heart or stomach sweetbread and both come from young veal. Order ahead; they are rarely in the case.
- The hinge: soak, blanch, pressSoak in several changes of cool water until the water runs clear, then blanch 3 to 5 minutes only, and chill in ice water before pulling off the membrane. Modern practice adds a step the book omits: press the peeled sweetbreads flat between two plates with a weight for an hour in the refrigerator, which firms them so slices hold together in the pan.
- Freshness is not negotiableThe warning that they "do not keep well" is accurate. Glandular tissue spoils faster than muscle. Use them the day you buy them, keep them at the back of the refrigerator on ice, and blanch on arrival if you must hold them overnight.
- Cut the long simmerThin slices simmered three-quarters of an hour in gravy will fall to threads. Ten to fifteen minutes is enough for sliced blanched sweetbreads in sauce; whole lobes may take twenty-five. The egg-and-cream finish should be added off direct heat and warmed only until it thickens, or it will curdle.
- Larding, and what to do insteadSalt fat pork drawn through with a larding needle was insurance against dryness. A larding needle is now specialist equipment; wrapping the lobes in thin pancetta or simply browning them in butter after a light flour dusting achieves the same end.
- Units and ovenA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of mingled milk and water is a quarter cup. A moderate oven for the roasting method is 350F, with basting every ten minutes or so; count on 25 to 35 minutes for parboiled lobes.
- The fritter batterOne cup milk, one egg, one cup flour, salt and half a teaspoon baking powder gives a thin coating batter. Fry at 350 to 365F; the sweetbreads have only been blanched or parboiled, so fry long enough to cook them through as well as brown the crust.
- YieldA pair of veal sweetbreads weighs roughly a pound and serves two to three as a course. The green pea version, using five, serves five or six.
Sweetbreads were a standard of nineteenth-century American company cookery, and Buckeye Cookery treats them as the reader would expect: a delicacy, but an ordinary butcher's purchase, since a household that bought veal had the glands available as a matter of course. The name has nothing to do with bread or sugar; "bread" is generally traced to an Old English word for flesh or a roasted piece, and "sweet" is usually explained as a reference to the mild, rich taste as against strong-flavored offal such as kidney or liver. The book's careful distinction between throat and heart sweetbread, and its insistence that the heart one is finer, reflects a period when cooks bought whole cuts and knew the anatomy behind them. American appetite for the dish faded through the twentieth century as offal generally left the home kitchen, and it survives now mainly on restaurant menus.