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Sweetbreads, Cotelettes Of
Procure the sweetbreads as fresh as possible. Soak them for an hour. Throw them into boiling water for five minutes, let them cool, then simmer them in rich, well-seasoned gravy. Leave them in the liquor till cold. Cut them into pieces an inch square, put them on skewers alternately with a little piece of bacon or a piece of ready-cooked calf's udder, all being made as nearly as possible of the same shape and size. Dip them twice into egg and bread-crumbs. Pat them into shape with a knife, and fry in hot fat till they are lightly browned. Send white or brown Italian sauce to table in a tureen. Sometimes bearded oysters are put upon the skewers with the sweetbreads and bacon. Time, half an hour to simmer the sweetbreads. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. to 5s. each.
A Victorian composite fry-up: poached sweetbreads cut into cubes, threaded on skewers with bacon, crumbed and fried, then patted into a cutlet shape. Most of the work is in the preparation of the sweetbreads themselves, and one step the original leaves out is worth adding.
- What a sweetbread isVeal sweetbreads are the thymus (the elongated "throat" sweetbread) and the pancreas (the rounder "heart" or "kernel" sweetbread, generally the prized one). They are highly perishable, so "as fresh as possible" is not decoration — order from a butcher and cook the day you buy, or the day after at the outside.
- Soak, then peelThe hour's soak should be in several changes of cold water, until the water runs clear of blood. After the five-minute blanch and cooling, pull off the outer membrane and any tubes or fat — the book assumes you know to do this, and skipping it gives chewy, gristly cubes.
- Press themBetween the blanch and the simmer, flatten the sweetbreads under a plate with a weight on it for an hour or two in the fridge. This firms the flesh so it cuts into clean inch squares rather than crumbling on the skewer.
- "Rich, well-seasoned gravy"A good veal or chicken stock, reduced, with a bay leaf and a little wine. Half an hour at a bare simmer is right for veal sweetbreads; boiling toughens them. Cooling them in the liquor is what keeps them moist, so do not rush that.
- Calf's udderAn ordinary butcher's item in the Victorian period, essentially unobtainable now. Its job here was a bland, soft, pale foil to the bacon — leave it out, or use a piece of poached veal or a cube of firm-set thick bacon.
- Bearded oysters"Bearded" means the frill or mantle trimmed away. If you use them, add them raw to the skewer; the brief fry is all the cooking they need, and oysters given longer than a couple of minutes of heat turn rubbery.
- Italian sauceSauce italienne: a reduction of white wine and shallots with duxelles (finely chopped mushrooms), finished with either velouté (white) or espagnole and tomato (brown), and fresh herbs. Any decent mushroom-and-shallot pan sauce fills the role.
- FryingThe double egg-and-crumb needs fat at 350–375F and about three to four minutes — the interior is already cooked, so you are only setting and colouring the crust. Drain on paper, not on a cloth.
- YieldA good veal sweetbread will give roughly two skewers, so allow one per person as a first course. The original's "1s. 6d. to 5s. each" most likely refers to the price of a sweetbread rather than of the finished dish.
Sweetbreads sat near the top of the nineteenth-century offal hierarchy — delicate, pale, expensive, and served in the same register as chicken breast or fillet of sole rather than as thrift cookery. The name has nothing to do with bread or sugar; it is generally traced to an older sense of "bread" meaning a morsel or piece of flesh, with "sweet" marking its mildness. Calling the dish cotelettes reflects the period's fondness for reshaping one food into the silhouette of another: skewered cubes patted with a knife until they read as a cutlet, complete with the skewer standing in for a rib bone. Cassell's places it among the calf's-head, brains and udder preparations that a well-run late-Victorian kitchen bought whole and used entirely — which is why calf's udder appears here as casually as bacon, and why it now needs explaining.