Home › The Principles of Cookery › Sweetbreads, Cutlets of, Fricasseed
Sweetbreads, Cutlets of, Fricasseed
Prepare and fry the cutlets according to the directions that have been already given. Thicken a small quantity of nicely-seasoned gravy with roux or brown thickening. Flavour it with mushroom ketchup and lemon-juice, and add a table-spoonful of sherry or Madeira. Put in the fried slices, let them simmer gently for a few minutes, and serve altogether on a dish.
A cross-reference recipe: Cassell's assumes you have already read the entries on preparing and frying sweetbread cutlets, so the real work happens before the first sentence. Here is what that work is, plus the parts of the sauce that need translating.
- What the cutlets areVeal sweetbreads (thymus and pancreas). The usual period treatment, which the earlier entries would have described, is to soak them in several changes of cold water, blanch them briefly, refresh in cold water, trim off membrane and ducts, then press them flat between two plates under a weight until cold. Only then are they sliced into cutlet-sized pieces, egged and crumbed, and fried in butter until golden.
- The hinge: keep the simmer briefThe sweetbreads are already cooked through by this stage. Two to three minutes in the sauce is all they want; longer and they tighten and the crumb coating turns to paste. If the coating matters to you, pour the sauce onto the dish and set the cutlets on top rather than simmering them at all.
- Buy them fresh and use them fastSweetbreads are among the most perishable offal. Use within a day of purchase, or buy frozen and thaw in the refrigerator. They should smell clean and milky, and look pale pink to ivory.
- "Gravy" in this bookNot pan drippings and not a packet mix, but a made, reduced brown stock. About a cup for a pound of sweetbreads gives enough to coat without drowning them.
- Brown thickeningThe recipe offers roux and "brown thickening" as alternatives, so the book treats them as two things: brown thickening was generally browned flour, kept ready for the purpose. A conventional brown roux will do the job; a little beurre manie whisked in at the end will thicken the sauce, though it is not the same preparation.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom liquor, quite unlike tomato ketchup, and still sold by a few British makers. A teaspoon of light soy sauce with a few drops of Worcestershire approximates the salt-and-umami effect.
- The wineDry sherry (fino or amontillado) or a dry sercial Madeira. Cream sherry will make the sauce cloying against the delicate meat.
- YieldA pound of sweetbreads, pressed and sliced, serves two to three as a main course or four as a first course.
- A note on the nameDespite "fricasseed," this is a brown sauce. The Victorian usage is looser than the modern one and here simply means the fried pieces are finished in a made sauce.
Sweetbreads were a standard, respectable item on the Victorian and Edwardian table rather than the specialist purchase they have become — a butcher who broke down whole calves had them to sell, and the cookery dictionaries of the period carry numerous preparations. Cassell's places this one in a chain of entries, each building on the last, which is why it opens by pointing back to "the directions that have been already given": the compilers were writing a reference work, not a book to be read straight through. The seasonings tell you the decade as clearly as a date would. Mushroom ketchup, a bottled brown liquor pressed from salted mushrooms, was an everyday savoury flavouring of the British kitchen, and a spoonful of sherry or Madeira in a brown sauce was a routine instruction.