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Calf's Sweetbreads, Stewed
Put two sweetbreads, prepared as above, into a stewpan with some nicely-flavoured stock, and let them simmer gently for three-quarters of an hour or more. Take them out and place them on a hot dish. Draw the gravy from the fire for a minute or two, and add to it very gradually the yolk of an egg and four table-spoonfuls of cream. Put this over a gentle fire until the sauce thickens, but do not allow it to boil. Just before serving, squeeze into it the juice of a lemon. Sufficient for three persons.
A plain braise finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. The whole dish hangs on the sauce never reaching a boil, and on the preparation the book assumes you have already done.
- "Prepared as above"The preliminaries are given in the preceding entry, and are usually soaking in several changes of cold water until the sweetbreads are pale, a brief blanching, then cooling and pressing to hold their shape. Skip the soaking and the finished dish looks and tastes bloody.
- What a sweetbread isThe thymus of a young calf (the throat or neck sweetbread is the thymus proper; the "heart" or "stomach" sweetbread is the pancreas). Order ahead from a butcher, and use them within a day of purchase, as they are highly perishable.
- Cooking timeThree-quarters of an hour is generous for the small, thin sweetbreads normally sold now; 25 to 35 minutes at a bare simmer is usually enough for them to be firm and yielding rather than cottony. Judge by feel, not the clock.
- The liaisonOff the heat, whisk the yolk and cream together in a bowl, then temper with a ladle of the hot stock before returning it all to the pan. Hold it below 180F and stir continuously; boiling scrambles the yolk, and once broken the sauce is hard to bring back.
- Stock strength"Nicely-flavoured stock" means a light veal or chicken stock, unsalted or lightly salted, since it reduces into the sauce. If the sauce is thin after thickening, lift the sweetbreads out earlier and reduce the stock before adding the yolk.
- The lemonA whole lemon's juice will overwhelm four tablespoons of cream. Add it in stages and stop when the sauce tastes bright; the acid also risks curdling a hot yolk sauce, so add it last and off the heat.
- YieldTwo sweetbreads for three people, as stated, works as a first course or a light main with rice, toast or peas. As a centre-of-plate dish, allow one sweetbread per person.
Sweetbreads were prized in nineteenth-century British and French kitchens as the mildest of the offal, delicate enough to be served to invalids as well as at formal dinners, and they appear alongside many other variety-meat preparations that a Victorian household cook was expected to handle. The finish here -- yolk and cream stirred into hot stock and never boiled -- is the classic liaison, the same thickening used for blanquette de veau. The name is generally traced to "sweet" for the mild flavour and an old sense of "bread" as a morsel or piece of flesh, though the derivation is not certain; it has nothing to do with baking. Offal eating had been in long decline in Britain before the BSE era, and the controls of the late 1980s and 1990s, which restricted bovine thymus among other offals, did nothing to help; a dish once considered ordinary now reads as a luxury.