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Lamb Sweetbreads, with Bacon
Wash and trim the sweetbreads, and boil them in a little milk and water or weak stock for fifteen to twenty minutes. Add a few pieces of carrot, turnip, and onion, a sprig of thyme, and parsley to flavour. Take them up, dry them, and when cool egg and bread-crumb them; flavour the crumbs with a pinch of salt, pepper, and herbs. Fry lightly some small slices of bacon, two for each sweetbread, then keep them hot, and cook the sweetbreads in the bacon fat. Serve on a hot dish, and garnish with the bacon, for a breakfast dish, without sauce or gravy; but if for a luncheon dish a little suitable sauce may be poured round, and nicely-dressed vegetables served in the centre.
A straightforward two-stage treatment: poach, crumb, fry. The only real difficulty now is buying the sweetbreads, since almost no supermarket carries them and the ones sold vary in size by a factor of three.
- What you are buyingSweetbreads are the thymus (throat) and pancreas (heart or stomach) glands of a young animal. Lamb sweetbreads are small, roughly walnut-sized, and much more delicate than veal; order them from a butcher, and expect to soak them in several changes of cold water for an hour or two to draw out blood before you begin.
- Trim means peel"Wash and trim" glosses over the fiddly part. After poaching, while still warm, pull off the outer membrane and any tubes or fatty threads. Skip this and the coating lifts away in the pan.
- TimingFifteen to twenty minutes suits veal sweetbreads. Lamb sweetbreads are firm in five to eight minutes in barely simmering liquid; longer and they turn dense and grainy. The vegetables and herbs should go into the liquid at the start, not after, if they are to flavour anything.
- Press themThe instruction to dry and cool them leaves room to press. Lay the poached, peeled sweetbreads between two plates with a light weight for half an hour in the fridge; they slice cleanly and crumb evenly. The recipe does not mention pressing, though it is common in classic treatments.
- Egg and bread-crumbFlour lightly first, then beaten egg, then dry crumbs seasoned with salt, pepper and a pinch of dried thyme. Dry crumbs colour more evenly than fresh.
- Frying in the bacon fatTwo thin rashers per sweetbread yields little fat from modern streaky bacon. Have butter or a neutral oil ready to bring the depth up to a few millimetres, and keep the heat moderate — medium, around 350F if you are measuring — so the crumbs colour in three or four minutes a side rather than scorching.
- Sauce for the luncheon version'A little suitable sauce' would point to something like a well-reduced brown gravy, a bechamel with mushroom, or a sharp tomato sauce. Pour it round the dish, not over, or the coating softens.
- YieldAllow three or four lamb sweetbreads per person as a breakfast or light lunch dish, roughly 4 oz of trimmed weight per person.
Sweetbreads were everyday food in late-Victorian Britain in a way they are not now, and the book treats them as a stock item rather than a luxury - hence their appearance among breakfast dishes, alongside kidneys, devilled bones and fried fish. The name is not well explained by 'bread' or 'sugar'; one common suggestion traces it to older usages in which 'bread' or 'braed' meant a piece of flesh, with 'sweet' distinguishing the mild glands from strong-tasting offal, though the origin is not settled. Lamb sweetbreads, being small and quick to cook, were generally cheaper than veal, which commanded the higher price in restaurant kitchens. The egg-and-crumb-and-fry method here is a standard nineteenth-century way of making a pale, soft, poached thing servable: it gives colour, contrast and a means of carrying seasoning, and the same logic is applied to croquettes, cutlets and rissoles. That the dish is offered without sauce for breakfast and with sauce and vegetables for luncheon says a good deal about how the two meals differed in a household with a cook.