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Sweetbreads, Ragout Of
Soak, blanch, and cool the sweetbreads, then simmer them in nicely-seasoned stock for half an hour. Let them cool, cut them into pieces about an inch square and half an inch thick, dry them perfectly, and flour them; then fry them in butter till they are brightly browned. Put into a saucepan a pint of stock, add a sliced onion and a sliced carrot, both fried, a little piece of bacon-rind, a table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, a little salt and cayenne, and two allspice. Add a spoonful of brown thickening, and simmer the sauce for a quarter of an hour. Strain it, and put the browned sweetbreads into it for a few minutes. Place them on a dish, and pour the sauce over them. Send rice boiled as for curry, or a little macaroni to table on a separate dish. Time, one hour, exclusive of the time taken in preparing the sweetbreads for dressing.
A Victorian braise-then-fry treatment of sweetbreads, finished in a strained brown sauce. The only real obstacles are sourcing the main ingredient and decoding two nineteenth-century pantry items.
- What to buyVeal sweetbreads (the thymus and pancreas of a calf) are meant here; the heart-shaped pancreatic "heart bread" is the prized cut, the elongated throat bread is looser in texture. Lamb sweetbreads work and are smaller. Order ahead from a butcher and use them within a day of purchase, as they spoil quickly.
- Soak, blanch, cool — the step the recipe assumes you knowSoak in several changes of cold water for two to three hours until the water runs clear, bring slowly to a boil in fresh water, drain, and plunge into cold water. Then peel away the outer membrane and fat while the sweetbreads are still slightly warm and pliable; if you leave the membrane on, the pieces contract and toughen in the pan.
- Press themThe book skips this, but pressing blanched sweetbreads flat between two plates with a weight while they cool is called for in a number of period recipes. It gives even slices that fry cleanly rather than crumbling.
- Brown thickeningA browned roux, made ahead in quantity and kept in a jar: flour cooked in butter or drippings until nut-coloured. A tablespoon of flour cooked in a tablespoon of butter until it smells toasty will do for a pint of stock.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom-and-spice liquid, not the tomato sauce the word now suggests. It is still sold by British specialists; a teaspoon of soy sauce plus a splash of Worcestershire gives a comparable savoury depth, though the mushroom note is lost.
- Two allspiceTwo whole allspice berries, not two spoonfuls. They go into the sauce and come out at the straining.
- MeasuresA pint here is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz, or about 2 1/2 US cups of stock.
- Timing at the endThe sweetbreads have already had half an hour in stock and a browning in butter. Returning them to the strained sauce is for warming and glazing only — two or three minutes. Longer and the crisp floured surface softens back into the sauce.
- YieldA pair of veal sweetbreads, roughly a pound after trimming, serves three to four with the rice or macaroni served alongside as directed.
Sweetbreads occupied a curious place in Victorian cookery: offal, and therefore cheap in principle, but delicate enough to appear at good tables as an entrée between the fish and the roast. The recipe treats them as a standard item of the repertoire, which is why the soaking and blanching are dispatched in four words. The sauce is a compressed version of the classical brown ragout: fried aromatics, bacon rind for gelatine and savour, a browned roux, and a bottled flavouring in the shape of mushroom ketchup, which was a fixture of the English store cupboard long before tomato ketchup displaced the word. The instruction to send rice "boiled as for curry" on a separate dish reflects the Anglo-Indian habit of serving plain dry-boiled rice as an accompaniment rather than mixing it in.