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Sweetbreads, Patties Of
Cold dressed sweetbread, if cut into quarter-inch dice and prepared according to the directions already given for making sweetbread croquettes, may be used for filling small patties or vol-au-vent cases. They should be put into the oven for a minute or two to make them quite hot, and served on a hot napkin. This mince may also be enclosed in a circular piece of pastry of the size of a crown piece, and fried in hot fat till the pastry is sufficiently cooked. The patties should then be drained and piled on a napkin.
This is a leftovers entry rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have already read the croquette instructions elsewhere in the book and have cooked sweetbread in the refrigerator. The points below fill in what Cassell's leaves unsaid.
- What the mince actually isThe croquette preparation the entry refers to is diced cooked sweetbread bound in a very thick béchamel or velouté, seasoned and left to set cold. Without that stiff binding the filling will run out of the pastry, so the sauce wants to be thick enough to hold a spoon upright when chilled.
- SweetbreadsThymus (throat) or pancreas (heart) glands, from veal or lamb. They must be soaked, blanched, pressed and cooked before they reach this recipe — "cold dressed" means all of that has already happened. Order them from a butcher; supermarkets rarely stock them.
- A crown pieceThe Victorian crown was about 1½ inches across, so these fried patties are small — turnover-sized bites, not hand pies. Cut with a plain round cutter, damp the edge, fold and seal.
- Oven for reheating the cases"A minute or two to make them quite hot" assumes a range oven already going. Reckon on 350°F for filled cases; hot enough to warm through without drying the pastry or splitting the sauce.
- Frying temperatureThe fried version needs fat at 350–375°F. Cooler and the pastry absorbs grease before it colours; hotter and the outside browns while the chilled filling is still cold in the middle.
- The hingeEverything in the patty is already cooked, so the only job is heating through. Overheating is the real risk — sweetbread reheated hard turns from creamy to grainy, and a boiled-out béchamel goes oily.
- The hot napkinA folded linen napkin on the serving dish absorbs frying fat and steam so the pastry stays crisp. A rack or a paper-lined dish does the same work if you would rather not grease a napkin.
- YieldThe entry gives no quantities. A pound of cooked sweetbread with its binding sauce will fill a couple of dozen small patty cases, or a rather larger number of the tiny crown-sized turnovers. Serve as a hot savoury or a first course.
Sweetbreads were a luxury item in the Victorian larder — expensive per pound, delicate in flavour, and fiddly enough in preparation that they signalled a serious kitchen. That expense is exactly why this entry exists: a household that had served a dish of larded sweetbreads at dinner was not going to throw away the trimmings, and Cassell's devotes considerable space to turning yesterday's roast, fish or offal into today's small hot dish. Patties and vol-au-vent cases were among the vehicles used. The word "sweetbread" itself is unexplained by any documented etymology; the second element is generally traced to an Old English word for flesh rather than to bread, and the "sweet" is usually said to distinguish the mild glands from stronger offal, but both halves remain guesswork. "A crown piece" appears as a unit of measurement.