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Braised or Smothered Sweetbreads
Soak and blanch the sweetbreads, and lard them with strips of salt pork or bacon. Put them in a shallow, covered baking-dish; pour over them enough rich brown stock to nearly cover them; sprinkle lightly with salt and white pepper, add a dash of mace.
Cover closely, and bake in a moderately hot oven for half an hour. Serve with macaroni or spaghetti or boiled rice.
A straightforward braise that depends almost entirely on the preparation of the sweetbreads before they ever reach the dish. The original assumes you know how to soak, blanch and press them; that step is the whole recipe.
- What you are buyingSweetbreads are the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb; veal heart sweetbreads (the rounder, denser lobe) are the ones worth braising. Order them ahead from a butcher, and use them within a day.
- Soak and blanch, in fullSoak in several changes of cold water, or lightly salted water, for two to three hours until they lose their pinkness. Then bring them slowly to a simmer in fresh water for about 3 minutes, plunge into ice water, and peel away the outer membrane and any hard tubes.
- Press themThe step the text leaves out: after blanching, lay the sweetbreads flat between two plates with a weight on top and chill for an hour. Pressed sweetbreads slice cleanly and lard without tearing; unpressed ones crumble.
- LardingThreading strips of salt pork through the meat with a larding needle is optional now. Draping thin bacon or barding fat over the top achieves most of the same effect, and salt pork should be blanched first or the dish turns very salty.
- Oven temperature"Moderately hot" is usually read today as somewhere around 375-400F, though period books gave no fixed scale. Half an hour at that heat suits whole veal sweetbreads roughly 1 inch thick; they are done when firm and opaque throughout.
- Rich brown stockA well-reduced veal or beef stock, ideally one with some body from bones. Commercial broth is thin by comparison; reduce a quart by a third before using, or the braising liquid will not glaze.
- MaceGround mace is the outer covering of nutmeg, warmer and less sweet. A dash means a pinch for the whole dish; it should be barely identifiable behind the stock.
- Finish the liquidLift the sweetbreads out and reduce the pan juices hard on the stovetop before pouring them over. As written the sauce stays thin and watery on the rice or pasta.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 lb of sweetbreads serves four as a main course, six as a first course.
Sweetbreads were standard restaurant and household fare in America and Britain through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, sitting somewhere between economy meat and delicacy: cheap in the sense that they came from the offal trade, prized in the sense that good ones were scarce and had to be spoken for in advance. The origin of the name is uncertain; one long-standing suggestion connects the second element to an Old English word for flesh rather than to bread, but this is not settled. Larding with salt pork, as here, was a common treatment for lean, delicate meats before ovens held steady heat, and "smothered" was used in older American cookery for cooking under a tight lid in a small amount of liquid, closer to braising than to the pan-smothered chicken the word now usually suggests. The dish fell out of home cooking in the second half of the twentieth century as offal generally did, and has returned mostly through restaurant kitchens.