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Calf's Sweetbreads with Mushrooms
Soak two sweetbreads for an hour in warm water with a tea-spoonful of salt; pick off all the skin and cut away any fat or gristle; put on to boil for half an hour in sufficient water to cover, then strain the liquid off. Put the sweetbreads in a saucepan with half a pint of milk and half a tea-spoonful of salt, a little cayenne, and six large fresh mushrooms; allow them to boil slowly for another half hour, thicken with a little flour, put in a dessert-spoonful of butter and another of chopped parsley; dish the sweetbreads up whole with the sauce.
A plain Victorian braise that depends almost entirely on how the sweetbreads are handled before they meet the milk. The soaking and blanching are not optional steps to be hurried.
- What to buyButchers sell two sorts: the elongated throat (thymus) sweetbread and the rounder, finer heart or belly sweetbread (pancreas). Either works here; two of them come to roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb and will serve two generously or four as a first course. Order ahead, as they are rarely in the case.
- The soak mattersAn hour in warm salted water draws out blood and slackens the membrane. Cold or iced water is now preferred for food-safety reasons and works just as well if you give it two or three changes over an hour or two in the refrigerator.
- Peel after blanching, not beforeThe book has you pick off the skin before the first boil. It is far easier the other way round: blanch, plunge into cold water, then strip the membrane and any gristle while the sweetbread is firm and cool. Left on, the membrane tightens and buckles the meat.
- Cut the total cooking timeHalf an hour of boiling followed by another half hour in milk is a full hour, which turns sweetbreads to paste. Blanch 10 to 15 minutes at a bare simmer, then poach in the milk 15 to 20 minutes until just firm to the finger. Never let either stage reach a rolling boil.
- Half a pintIn this English book that is 10 fl oz, so use about 1 1/4 US cups of milk. A dessert-spoonful is 2 teaspoons, not a tablespoon.
- The mushrooms"Six large fresh mushrooms" most likely meant open-cap field or cultivated mushrooms, perhaps 6 to 8 oz. Modern portobellos will do but they bleed dark liquor into the milk; large cremini or whole button mushrooms keep the sauce pale.
- ThickeningFlour thrown into hot milk will lump. Work the flour into the butter as a beurre manié -- the recipe's dessert-spoonful of butter, 2 teaspoons, with as much flour -- and whisk it in off the boil, then let the sauce barely bubble a minute or two to lose the raw taste. Add the parsley at the very end.
- Doneness and servingCooked through, a sweetbread is firm but yielding, like a set custard, and creamy white throughout. The original directs only that they be dished up whole with the sauce; toast or a puff-pastry case are optional additions.
Sweetbreads were everyday eating in nineteenth-century Britain, cheap enough to feed invalids and children yet delicate enough for a dinner entree. The name has nothing to do with bread or sugar, though its origin is in fact obscure: it is often linked to the Old English bread in the older sense of a morsel or piece of flesh, with "sweet" said to distinguish the mild-tasting gland from strong offal such as liver and kidney, but this is conjecture rather than documented derivation. The milk poach here is standard period practice for anything wanted white on the plate -- brains, veal, chicken -- in an age when the visual paleness of a dish was itself a mark of refinement. Demand in Britain fell after BSE-era restrictions on bovine offal, which is why a cut once widely available now often has to be ordered specially.