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SWEETBREADS, FRIED (simple method)
Soak, blanch, and cool the sweetbreads. Dry them, cut them into slices, and dredge flour upon them. Fry them in hot fat till they are nicely browned, and pour good nicely-flavoured brown gravy over them. This is one of the most simple methods of dressing sweetbreads. Time, ten minutes to fry the slices.
The instruction assumes a cook who already knows the standing preparation for sweetbreads, which the book covers elsewhere. That preparation is the whole job; the frying is trivial.
- What a sweetbread isA gland of a calf or lamb: the elongated, stringier throat sweetbread is the thymus, the round, plump heart sweetbread is the pancreas. Veal heart sweetbreads are the ones worth buying; order them from a butcher, and use them within a day.
- Soak, blanch, coolSoak in several changes of cold water, an hour or two, until they lose their pinkness. Blanch means to start them in cold water, bring barely to a simmer for 2-3 minutes, then plunge into ice water, which firms the flesh so it can be sliced.
- The step the book omitsThe step this recipe leaves out -- after cooling, peel away the outer membrane and any hard veiny bits, then press the sweetbread between two plates with a weight for an hour. Pressing gives an even thickness that slices neatly and browns evenly.
- Frying fat and heatClarified butter, or butter with a little oil, at a good medium-high heat. "Hot fat" here means hot enough to brown on contact, around 350-375F if you are measuring; too cool and the flour turns pasty.
- Ten minutes is for thick slicesSlices cut about half an inch thick will brown in three or four minutes a side. Blanching has already firmed and partly cooked them, so the frying mainly finishes them and gives colour and crust; a full ten minutes on thin slices dries them out.
- The gravy"good nicely-flavoured brown gravy" means a reduced veal or beef stock thickened with a brown roux; a spoonful of sherry or Madeira is a modern addition, not implied by the text. The recipe says to pour it over, though pouring it around instead will keep the crust crisper.
- YieldReckon one veal sweetbread, which may run anywhere from about half a pound to a pound before trimming, for two people as a first course, or about three-quarters of a pound of trimmed sweetbreads for three.
Sweetbreads appear to have been familiar middle-class fare in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, and Cassell's gives them a long run of entries, because they were a delicate white meat that could be dressed up for a dinner party. The name is often said to have little to do with bread or sugar; one proposed derivation traces it to the Old English bræd meaning flesh, with "sweet" distinguishing it from the stronger-tasting organ meats, though the etymology is not settled. That this version is filed under "simple method" says something about the period's expectations: the elaborate preparations were the norm, and a plain flour-and-fry was the concession to a small household. Demand seems to have fallen away in Britain in the late twentieth century, and sweetbreads went from everyday butcher's stock to a restaurant item that has to be ordered ahead.