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Sweetbreads and Palates, Stewed
Prepare both palates and sweetbreads in the usual way. Cut them into moderate-sized pieces, dredge flour upon them, and fry them in hot fat till they are lightly browned. Put them into a saucepan, and stew them slowly in as much good veal gravy as will barely cover them. Thicken the sauce with brown thickening, season with pepper, salt, grated lemon-rind and nutmeg, and add a glassful of sherry or Madeira. Put the meat in a dish, and pour the sauce over it. If liked, a dessert-spoonful of vinegar or strained lemon-juice may be added at the last moment. Time to stew, about half an hour.
The recipe assumes you have already done the long, unglamorous work: "the usual way" hides several hours of preparation, and the half-hour stew is only the finish.
- Palates are the hingeOx palate is tough connective tissue and needs long, gentle simmering — commonly three to four hours — until the coarse outer skin can be rubbed away and the flesh is gelatinous. Nothing in the half-hour stew will soften an unprepared palate, and undercooked palate is unpleasantly rubbery.
- Preparing sweetbreadsSoak in several changes of cold water for an hour or two until they lose their pinkness, blanch in barely simmering salted water for a few minutes, then plunge into cold water, peel off the membrane and press between two plates under a weight until cold. Pressing is what gives the firm slices that will hold up to flouring and frying.
- SourcingVeal sweetbreads (the thymus, and also the pancreas) are a butcher's special order in most places; ox or calf palates are rarer still. The dish works with sweetbreads alone if palates are unavailable.
- Good veal gravyThis means a reduced brown veal stock, not a thickened pan gravy. A well-made veal or chicken stock reduced by a third will do; the sauce depends on it almost entirely.
- Brown thickeningA period term for a brown roux — flour cooked in butter or clarified fat until nut-coloured, and often kept ready in a jar. Whisk in a spoonful at a time and simmer a few minutes so the flour loses its raw taste.
- A glassfulA wine glass in this period is usually reckoned at about 2 to 2.5 fl oz, roughly a quarter cup. Add the sherry or Madeira with a few minutes of simmering left so the raw spirit softens but the aroma survives.
- Seasoning restraintGrated lemon rind and nutmeg go bitter and dusty in quantity. A quarter teaspoon of finely grated zest and a few scrapes of nutmeg are enough for a stew of this size; the vinegar or lemon juice at the end is the sharpener that keeps the whole thing from tasting flat and rich.
- YieldTwo pairs of veal sweetbreads with a palate or two serves four as a main course, six as an entrée in the older sense of a middle-of-the-meal dish.
Sweetbreads and palates together are a signature of nineteenth-century English "made dishes" — the class of small, richly sauced entrées that sat between the fish and the roast at a formal dinner. The pairing is practical as much as fashionable: sweetbread is tender and mild, palate is gelatinous and faintly gluey, and the two textures in one brown sauce give a dish more interest than either alone. Ox palate appears throughout Victorian and Edwardian cookery books, often in ragoûts and mock-turtle preparations, and is said to have remained available from butchers into the twentieth century before disappearing from the trade, a decline usually attributed to the narrowing of offal cookery after the Second World War. The sherry or Madeira and the finishing dash of lemon or vinegar mark the recipe as an heir to eighteenth-century English ragout practice, where fortified wine and an acid at the end were a conventional way to lift a long-simmered brown sauce.