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Sweetbreads, Pie Of
Take two or more fresh sweetbreads. Soak, blanch, and cool them, then cut each one into three pieces, and simmer them in white stock with about two dozen mushrooms. Let them simmer for a quarter of an hour. Lay them in a dish, put the mushrooms among them, and also six or eight veal forcemeat balls, the green tops of twenty-five sticks of asparagus, and the hard-boiled yolks of three or four eggs. Thicken the gravy with white thickening, add pepper and salt if required, and pour it over the meat. Lay slices of fat bacon on the top of the meat, cover all with good pastry, and bake the pie in a moderately-heated oven. Time, according to size. Probable cost of sweetbreads, 1s. 6d. to 5s. each.
A raised-flavour Victorian entree pie that assumes you know how to handle sweetbreads. The whole dish stands or falls on that preparation, so start there.
- Soak, blanch, cool — do not skipSweetbreads need several hours in cold water changed a few times to draw out blood, then a brief blanch (bring to the boil in fresh water, then straight into ice water). Cooling under a light weight firms them so they slice into thirds cleanly instead of tearing; unblanched sweetbreads shed grey scum into the gravy and stay flabby.
- What to buyButchers still sell veal sweetbreads; you may be offered either the heart (pancreas) or the throat (thymus). Heart sweetbreads are rounder and meatier. Order ahead; two of them, around 1 lb total, suits this pie.
- Fifteen minutes is for a raw sweetbreadThe quarter-hour simmer applies to blanched but otherwise uncooked sweetbreads, and it happens before the pie goes in the oven. They will cook again under the crust, so keep the simmer gentle and stop while they are still slightly firm.
- White stock and white thickeningWhite stock is unroasted veal or chicken stock, kept pale. "White thickening" is a white roux — equal butter and flour, cooked without colour — whisked into the simmering gravy. About 1 oz of each to a pint of stock gives a sauce that coats but does not set solid.
- Veal forcemeat ballsMinced veal bound with breadcrumbs, suet or butter, egg, lemon zest and mace, rolled small and poached or fried before they go in. Six to eight walnut-sized balls. Uncooked forcemeat dropped raw into the pie will leach and cloud the sauce.
- Asparagus topsTwenty-five stalks yields roughly a cup of 1-inch tips. Blanch two minutes and refresh in cold water — they will olive-drab under the crust otherwise, though the flavour survives.
- The baconFat bacon laid over the filling is barding: it bastes the lean sweetbread as the pie bakes. Use unsmoked streaky or fresh pork fatback; modern smoked bacon will dominate a deliberately delicate dish.
- Oven and timeA moderately heated oven is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F, though the recipe gives no temperature and says only "time, according to size". A pie of this size in a deep dish will likely need 35-45 minutes — long enough to cook and colour the pastry, no longer, since everything beneath it is already cooked.
- YieldServes four to six as a main course. Rest it ten minutes before cutting so the thickened gravy settles.
Sweetbreads were prized as delicate offal and priced accordingly — the note of 1s. 6d. to 5s. each is a substantial sum, which may be why the recipe pads it out with mushrooms, forcemeat, asparagus tips and egg yolks. The construction is a covered entree pie: cooked filling, bound in a pale sauce, crust laid over as a lid rather than as a vessel, so nothing overcooks. Asparagus tips and hard-boiled yolks scattered through a white ragout are a familiar English touch, and they serve here mainly for colour against the pale meat and sauce. Sweetbreads fell out of ordinary British cooking across the twentieth century and have only recently returned to restaurant menus, which is why the preparatory soaking and blanching the recipe takes for granted now needs spelling out.