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SWEETBREADS, CROQUETTES OF (another way)
Take a cold cooked sweetbread, cut it up into small pieces, and mix with it half its weight in finely-grated bread-crumbs. Season the mixture with salt, cayenne, grated lemon-rind, and grated nutmeg. Put it into a saucepan with as much cream or milk as will moisten the crumbs, and stir briskly over a clear fire for ten minutes. Spread the preparation on a dish, and let it get quite cold. Form it into equal-sized portions, roll these to the shape of corks or balls, dip them in egg and bread-crumbs, and fry them in hot fat till they are brightly browned. Drain them before the fire, and serve as before. Time, ten minutes to fry the croquettes.
A use-up recipe that assumes you already have a cooked sweetbread on hand and a preceding entry to tell you how to serve it. Both gaps are easy to fill.
- Starting with the sweetbreadThe recipe takes the cooked sweetbread for granted. Veal sweetbreads (the throat or neck bread is the thymus; the heart or stomach bread is the pancreas) need soaking in several changes of cold water for a few hours, a brief blanch, then peeling of the outer membrane before being poached until firm and pressed under a weight until cold. Order them from a butcher; supermarkets rarely stock them.
- The hinge is the chillingThe panade must go cold and firm before shaping, and the shaped croquettes hold better after another 30 minutes in the fridge. Warm or slack mixture bursts in the fat and the whole thing unravels.
- "Half its weight" in crumbsWeigh the trimmed sweetbread and use half that weight in fine dry crumbs — roughly 4 oz sweetbread to 2 oz crumbs. Fresh soft crumbs absorb far more liquid than the dried ones intended here, so add cream cautiously; you want a stiff paste, not a batter.
- Ten minutes on the fireThe first ten minutes is the panade cooking on the stove, and it is about right: the crumbs must swell and the mixture pull away from the pan. Do not confuse it with the frying time given at the end.
- Frying time is too longTen minutes in hot fat will darken cork-sized croquettes well past "brightly browned." At 350-375F they need two to four minutes, until golden; everything inside is already cooked. Fry in small batches so the fat does not drop below temperature.
- Draining"Before the fire" means keeping them hot and dry while the rest fry. A rack over a low oven, around 250F, does the same job better than paper, which traps steam under the crust.
- "Serve as before"This refers back to the previous croquette entry in the dictionary. In practice: piled on a napkin or a bed of fried parsley, with tomato sauce, a sharp brown sauce, or lemon wedges.
- YieldOne good veal sweetbread with its crumbs makes about eight small croquettes — a first course for three or four, not a main dish.
Croquettes were the standard Victorian and Edwardian answer to cooked leftovers, and Cassell's runs dozens of them on the same template: chop the meat, bind it with a stiff crumb or panada paste, chill, shape, egg-and-crumb, fry. Sweetbreads were prized in that period as a delicate "white meat" suitable for invalids and for the lighter courses of a long dinner, which is why they appear so often in nineteenth-century English cookbooks and so rarely in modern ones — offal fell out of domestic favour in Britain over the twentieth century, and thymus in particular now travels mostly through restaurant kitchens. The word croquette comes from the French croquer, to crunch, and the "shape of corks" here is a genuine period specification, one of the several shapes period books call for.