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Sweetbreads, with Truffles
Prepare the sweetbreads in the usual manner, flour them, and bake in a gentle oven till they are lightly browned. Baste frequently. Whilst they are baking, prepare the sauce to be served with them as follows. Peel half a dozen truffles, and cut them into slices about the third of an inch thick. Put these in a saucepan with a large wine-glassful of Marsala, the strained juice of a lemon, and a little salt and cayenne. Let them simmer gently a few minutes, then add a quarter of a pint of good stock. Thicken the gravy with brown thickening, and let it boil till smooth. Put in the sweetbreads, let them simmer twenty minutes longer, and serve very hot. Time, altogether, one hour. Probable cost of sweetbreads, 1s. 6d. to 5s. each.
A Victorian entrée that assumes you already know how to handle sweetbreads and can lay hands on six truffles. The first assumption is the one to deal with.
- "The usual manner"This is the whole foundation of the dish and the book leaves it unsaid. Soak veal sweetbreads in several changes of cold water for two to three hours until they whiten, blanch them for about five minutes in salted water, refresh in cold water, then peel away the outer membrane and fat and press between two plates under a weight until cold and firm. Skipping the pressing gives you a soft, shapeless result.
- Gentle ovenAround 300-325F. The point is to set and colour the floured surface without drying the interior, which is why the recipe insists on frequent basting; use butter or a little stock in the pan.
- Wine-glassfulA wine-glass in this period is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so a 'large' one a little more; nothing like a modern 6 oz pour. Marsala is still sold and dry Marsala suits this better than sweet.
- A quarter of a pintImperial measure, so 5 fl oz, or 1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons. Use a well-flavoured veal or brown chicken stock; the sauce is short and any weakness in it shows.
- Brown thickeningThe book's term for a brown roux, flour cooked in butter until nut-coloured. A tablespoon each of butter and flour cooked to a hazelnut colour, whisked in off the boil, will thicken this quantity.
- TrufflesSix peeled fresh truffles sliced a third of an inch thick is a quantity no one buys now. A single small fresh black truffle, shaved rather than sliced, or a jar of preserved truffle peelings with their liquor added at the end, gives the same direction of flavour. Do not substitute truffle oil in a simmered sauce; it turns acrid.
- The final twenty minutesThe sweetbreads are already cooked through when they leave the oven, and twenty minutes more at a simmer will make them woolly. Five minutes in the finished sauce, just to warm through and take up flavour, is enough.
- YieldTwo prepared veal sweetbreads with this quantity of sauce serve four as a first course, or two as a main dish with rice or plain boiled potatoes.
Sweetbreads are the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb, and the name has nothing to do with bread or sugar; the origin is in fact obscure, though the "sweet" is generally taken to distinguish their mild flavour from muscle meat, and "bread" is often traced to an Old English word for a piece or morsel. In the nineteenth-century service order they belonged among the entrées, the light made dishes that came between fish and roast, and they carried real prestige: the cost note here, 1s. 6d. to 5s. each, puts a single sweetbread at the price of several pounds of cheap meat. Truffles and a fortified wine are the idiom of French restaurant cookery, though the choice of Marsala rather than Madeira is an English domestic touch. Offal of this kind was expensive partly because each animal yields so little of it, and the modern reversal, in which sweetbreads are unfamiliar rather than grand, has more to do with changed butchery and squeamishness than with any decline in the eating.