Home › Salads and Salad Dressings › Sweetbreads-and-Cucumber Salad
Sweetbreads-and-Cucumber Salad
Let a pair of sweetbreads lie in French dressing for an hour. Chill, drain, and mix with an equal quantity of sliced cucumber. Stir a little whipped cream lightly into a French dressing and pour over the sweetbreads and cucumbers.
A late-Victorian composed salad that assumes a kitchen already fluent in offal cookery: the book takes for granted that sweetbreads reach the salad bowl fully cooked and trimmed. Everything else here is assembly.
- Cook the sweetbreads firstThe instruction to "let a pair of sweetbreads lie in French dressing" refers to sweetbreads already poached and cooled, not raw ones. Soak them in several changes of cold water until pale, blanch, slip off the outer membrane, then poach in salted acidulated water until firm through, cool under a weight, and only then marinate. Raw or lightly warmed sweetbreads are not safe eating.
- What a sweetbread isThe thymus ("throat") and pancreas ("heart" or "belly") of a milk-fed calf or lamb. Size varies a good deal: a pair of veal sweetbreads may run to a pound or more, a pair of lamb's far less, so judge quantity by eye against the cucumber. Sweetbreads usually have to be ordered ahead, and may come frozen.
- French dressing, 1900 senseNot the sweet orange bottled dressing. It means a plain vinaigrette: about three parts oil to one part vinegar, salt, pepper, whisked to a temporary emulsion. Make it thin, since it doubles as the marinade.
- The whipped cream dressingWhip a few tablespoons of heavy cream to soft peaks and fold it lightly into fresh vinaigrette just before pouring it over the salad. The mixture separates fairly quickly, so make it at the last moment rather than in advance.
- CucumbersPeriod cucumbers were thick-skinned and seedy; peel and seed them, or use an English cucumber. Salt the slices for fifteen minutes and pat dry, or the salad will pool water under the cream dressing.
- Marinating timeAn hour in acid dressing is ample for cooked sweetbreads; there is nothing to gain by going longer. Keep it in the refrigerator, not at room temperature.
- Yield and serviceServes four as a first course. Serve cold on crisp lettuce, dressed at the last moment, with thin bread and butter.
Sweetbreads were a luxury item in American and British cooking from the 1870s through the 1920s, appearing at hotel dinners, wedding breakfasts and ladies' luncheons, and the compendium cookbooks of the period carried a good many ways to serve them: creamed, larded, in patty shells, broiled on skewers, and cold in salads like this one. Pairing them with cucumber follows the era's logic that a rich, faintly sweet meat wants something cold and watery beside it, the same reasoning that put cucumber with salmon. The cream folded into vinaigrette sits between the French oil-and-vinegar dressing and the boiled and mayonnaise dressings that dominated American salad chapters; it softens the acid without the weight of full mayonnaise. Sweetbreads fell out of general use after the mid-century, partly on squeamishness and partly because veal offal became a specialty order rather than a butcher's staple.