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Sweetbreads, Baked
Soak the sweetbreads well in water for two hours, and change the water once or twice during the time. Throw them into boiling water, and let them simmer gently for five minutes or more, till they are firm and round, but not hard. Take them up, drain them, and throw them into cold water to cool. Brush them over in every part with beaten egg, roll them in bread-crumbs, sprinkle clarified butter upon them, and bread-crumb them again. Put them in a baking-tin with about two ounces of butter, and bake in a well-heated oven; baste them till they are done enough and brightly browned. Take as many slices of hot toast as there are sweetbreads. Put them in a dish, lay the sweetbreads upon them, pour brown gravy round, but not over them, and serve immediately. Time to bake from half to three-quarters of an hour, according to size. Probable cost of sweetbreads. 1s. 6d. to 5s. each.
A straightforward crumbed-and-baked treatment of veal sweetbreads, written for a cook who already knows the standard preparation. Two things need translating: what "a well-heated oven" means, and how long a blanched sweetbread actually wants in it.
- What to buy"Sweetbread" in a Victorian kitchen normally means veal — either the throat (thymus) or the heart/stomach sweetbread (pancreas), the latter being the rounder, plumper, more expensive one. Ask a butcher for veal heart sweetbreads and expect to order ahead; lamb sweetbreads are smaller and will need proportionally less time at every stage.
- Freshness matters more than usualOffal of this kind spoils quickly and there is no rescuing it. Use within a day of purchase, and keep it very cold in the soaking water — refrigerate rather than leaving it on the counter for the two hours specified.
- Why soak and blanchThe long soak with changes of water draws out blood so the finished sweetbread is pale, and the brief simmer firms it enough to peel and handle. After cooling, pull away the outer membrane and any gristle; the recipe assumes you know to do this.
- The pressing step it leaves outMany period recipes direct that blanched sweetbreads be pressed flat between two plates under a weight before crumbing. It gives an even thickness that browns uniformly and slices cleanly, and it is worth doing here.
- Oven temperatureA "well-heated oven" is usually taken to mean something in the region of 400-425F. Much lower and the double crumb coating will absorb butter without crisping.
- The timing is the problemHalf to three-quarters of an hour is far too long for something already simmered and only an inch or so thick. The sweetbread will go dense and grainy. At 400-425F, 20-25 minutes with basting is enough to set the crust and heat it through; the longer time in the original suits only a very large, unpressed pancreas sweetbread.
- Butter quantitiesTwo ounces is 4 tablespoons. "Clarified butter" sprinkled between the two crumb coats is melted butter with the milk solids removed — it will not scorch in the oven the way whole butter does, and it glues the second layer of crumbs on.
- The gravy"Brown gravy" in Victorian books covers a range, from a reduced brown stock to a pan gravy thickened with browned flour; a reduced veal stock suits this dish well. Pouring it around rather than over is deliberate: it keeps the crust crisp and the toast from dissolving.
- YieldOne sweetbread and one round of toast per person, as a first course or light main.
Sweetbreads sat near the top of the Victorian meat hierarchy — delicate, pale, laborious, and reliably expensive, as Cassell's own price note admits: 1s. 6d. to 5s. each was a serious sum when a whole leg of mutton might be had for a few shillings. Short supply kept them a standing feature of the entrée course at good tables. The name has nothing to do with bread or sugar; its origin is genuinely uncertain, though it is often connected to the older sense of "bread" as a cooked morsel, with "sweet" distinguishing the mild-tasting gland from stronger offal. The method here — soak, blanch, peel, press, crumb, bake, set on toast with gravy poured around — is the standard nineteenth-century English handling, and it survives more or less intact in classical French kitchens as ris de veau pané. Their near-disappearance from British and American home cooking owes much to changing taste in offal, a decline that was well under way long before the late twentieth century.