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Sweetbreads, Fried
Soak the sweetbreads for an hour, plunge them into boiling water for five minutes, and throw them into cold water till cool. Cut them in slices, egg and bread-crumb them, dip them in clarified butter, bread them again, and fry in plenty of hot fat till they are brightly browned on both sides. Drain them, and then dish on toast, pouring cucumber sauce or maitre d'hotel sauce upon them. Time to fry the slices, about ten minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. to 5s. each.
A straightforward crumbed-and-fried treatment of veal sweetbreads, written for a kitchen where the butcher delivered daily. The main things to adjust are the frying time and the step the recipe assumes you already know.
- What a sweetbread isThe thymus gland of a calf or lamb; butchers also sell the round, plump "heart" bread, which is the pancreas, alongside the elongated "throat" bread. Veal is the prized kind and usually has to be ordered ahead; lamb sweetbreads are smaller and cook faster. They are highly perishable, so buy them cold, keep them cold, and use them within a day.
- Why the soak and the blanchThe hour in cold water draws out blood and leaves the flesh pale. The five minutes in boiling water firms the gland enough that the membrane and any gristle can be pulled off cleanly, which the recipe assumes rather than states. Do that peeling while they are cool and wet.
- The step Cassell leaves outPeriod cookery writers commonly direct that blanched sweetbreads be pressed between two plates under a weight before slicing, a step this recipe omits. It makes for neater slices and breading less likely to come away in the fat.
- Frying timeTen minutes seems long for thin breaded slices; depending on thickness, a few minutes a side in fat hot enough to brown briskly will give a deep gold crust. Note that the five-minute blanch only firms the gland; it does not cook it through, so the frying still has to cook the slices, not merely colour them.
- The double coatingEgg and crumb, a dip in clarified butter, then crumb again gives a thick shell that fries crisp and keeps the interior creamy. Ordinary melted butter will work but the milk solids in it scorch; clarified butter or a neutral oil is cleaner.
- The saucesMaitre d'hotel is softened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice and seasoning, set on the hot slices to melt. Nineteenth-century cucumber sauce is usually cucumber stewed soft in butter and sieved into a bechamel or veloute, served warm.
- Cost and yield"1s. 6d. to 5s. each" is the Victorian price of a single sweetbread and tells you this was expensive meat, not a household staple. Weights vary a good deal; one veal sweetbread, blanched, trimmed and sliced, will serve one or two as a first course.
Sweetbreads occupied an odd position in the Victorian kitchen: cheap in the sense that they were offal, dear in the sense that only a small quantity comes off each animal, which is why Cassell's quotes a price per piece rather than per pound. The origin of the name is uncertain; "bread" is often connected with Old English bræd, flesh, though this is a suggestion rather than a settled etymology. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for English middle-class households that wanted French dishes without French staff, presents them in the plainest possible register: soak, blanch, crumb, fry, sauce. Blanching and pressing remains a common professional preparation, and the pairing with a butter-and-parsley sauce or a cucumber velouté reflects a period taste for cutting rich, faintly sweet meat with something green and acid.