Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
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Sweetbreads, with Mushrooms
Soak, blanch, and trim two fine sweetbreads, and lard them evenly with thin strips of fat bacon. Slice a carrot, a turnip, a small onion, and a few sticks of celery, and fry these vegetables in hot fat till they are lightly browned. Drain away the fat, put the sweetbreads upon the vegetables, and add as much stock as will barely cover them, together with a little salt and cayenne, a small lump of sugar, the thin rind of half a lemon, as much grated nutmeg as will lie on a threepenny-piece, a small blade of mace, four allspice, and half a wine-glassful of brandy. Let the sauce boil quickly, skim carefully, and then simmer the sweetbreads till done enough. Take them up, put a little piece of fresh butter on each, and place them in the oven to keep them hot. Put into the gravy a dozen small mushrooms which have been skinned and cleaned, and add a tea-spoonful of tarragon vinegar and a little brown thickening. Put the sweetbreads again into the sauce, and let them simmer for ten or fifteen minutes. Serve on a hot dish with the sauce poured round them. Time to simmer the sweetbreads, half to three-quarters of an hour. Sufficient for four persons.
A Victorian braised entrée that still works, provided you understand what a sweetbread is and how briefly it wants cooking. Note the automated warning attached to this page: sweetbreads are the thymus and pancreas glands, not brain or spinal cord, and veal and lamb sweetbreads remain ordinary butcher's goods.
- What you are buyingSweetbreads are the thymus (throat) and pancreas (heart or stomach) glands, usually of veal or lamb. The heart sweetbread is rounder and more prized; ask a butcher, as few supermarkets carry them. Two "fine" ones means roughly 1 to 1.5 lb total.
- Soak, blanch, trim, pressThe recipe assumes you know the drill: soak in several changes of cold water until they pale, blanch three or four minutes from cold water, refresh, then peel away the membrane and gristle. Pressing them flat under a weighted plate for an hour firms the texture and makes larding possible.
- LardingThin strips of fat bacon threaded through the surface with a larding needle. Without the needle, drape thin bacon or pancetta over the top instead; the point is fat basting a very lean gland.
- Simmer timeHalf to three-quarters of an hour is long for modern trimmed sweetbreads. Twenty to twenty-five minutes at a bare shiver, then the further ten in the finished sauce, gives a creamy interior rather than a chalky one. The liquid must never boil after the initial skimming.
- Archaic measuresA wine-glassful is about 2 fl oz, so half is 2 tablespoons of brandy. "As much grated nutmeg as will lie on a threepenny-piece" is a coin a shade over half an inch across, which is a scant pinch. A blade of mace is one strip of the dried aril; a quarter teaspoon ground is a fair substitute.
- Brown thickeningA Victorian standby: flour cooked in butter until nut-brown, kept in a jar and whisked in as needed. A tablespoon each of butter and flour worked to a paste and stirred into the simmering sauce will thicken it, though without the browned colour and flavour.
- MushroomsSkinning applies to the large open-cap field mushrooms of the period. Modern button or chestnut mushrooms need only a wipe, and go in for the last ten minutes so they hold their shape.
- Keeping hot"Place them in the oven" indicates somewhere merely warm rather than any set heat; use a very low oven, loosely covered, for the few minutes the sauce is being finished.
- YieldFour as a light entrée, as stated, though by modern portioning two sweetbreads serve two generously as a main course with the sauce and some plain potatoes.
Sweetbreads occupied a settled place in nineteenth-century English dining as an entrée, the made dish served between fish and roast. The name has nothing to do with bread or sugar; its origin is unexplained, and the accounts that derive "bread" from an old sense of a piece or morsel, or from a word for flesh, remain competing conjectures. Almost every element of this version marks the period: larding lean meat with fat bacon, the bed of browned root vegetables serving as both flavouring and trivet, the pot of brown thickening kept ready in the larder, and the whole spice cupboard of mace, allspice and nutmeg that late-Victorian kitchens still applied to savoury braises. Tarragon vinegar, added at the end, was the standard bottled sharpener of the era, doing the work a squeeze of lemon or a splash of white wine might do now.