Home › Salads of Meat, Fish, Vegetables and Fruit › Sweetbread Salad
Sweetbread Salad
Soak one pair of sweetbreads in cold water for twenty minutes, then cook in boiling salted water twelve minutes.
Cool and cut in slices, mix with one cup of celery cut in small pieces, cover with French dressing and chill for at least one-half hour. Serve in nests made of the crisp inner leaves of a head of lettuce, and garnish with one cup of mayonnaise dressing.
A straightforward composed salad from the era when sweetbreads were a standard luncheon protein. Almost everything that needs attention is in the handling of the sweetbreads themselves.
- What sweetbreads areThe thymus (throat) and pancreas (heart or stomach) glands of a calf or lamb. "One pair" means one throat and one heart sweetbread from the same animal, roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb in veal. Order them from a butcher; they are rarely on supermarket shelves and are best used within a day.
- The soak is not optionalTwenty minutes in cold water is the shortest defensible version. Modern practice commonly calls for longer, two hours or more with several changes of water, or overnight in the refrigerator, to draw out blood and keep the flesh pale.
- Twelve minutes may not be enoughThat time suits a thin throat sweetbread; a plump heart sweetbread needs longer. Poach until firm all the way through and the center reaches 160F, which for veal usually runs 15 to 20 minutes at a bare simmer rather than a hard boil.
- Peel and pressThe recipe skips both steps. After poaching, plunge into ice water, then pull away the outer membrane and any gristle. Press the sweetbreads flat between two plates with a weight for an hour in the refrigerator; they slice cleanly instead of crumbling.
- French dressing, 1900A plain vinaigrette of oil, vinegar, salt and pepper in roughly three to one, not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name today. Make it sharp, since the sweetbreads are mild and the mayonnaise that follows is rich.
- The mayonnaiseA cup of mayonnaise as garnish assumed a thick homemade emulsion stiff enough to hold its shape in a spoonful. If you make it from scratch with raw yolks, use pasteurized eggs, and keep the assembled salad cold until it goes to the table.
- YieldFour servings as a lunch course, six if the lettuce cups are small and it is part of a larger meal.
Sweetbreads sat near the top of the American meat hierarchy from the 1880s through the 1920s: delicate, pale, expensive by weight, and reliably present on hotel and club menus, which made them a natural centerpiece for the kind of ladies' luncheon salad this sort of collection is full of. The pattern here is entirely of its period, a cooked protein cut small, dressed with vinaigrette, chilled, then served in a lettuce cup under a spoonful of mayonnaise, the same formula applied to chicken, lobster, veal and sweetbreads more or less interchangeably. The name has nothing to do with sugar or baking; "sweet" is generally taken to distinguish the mild flavor from muscle meat, and "bread" is usually traced to an Old English word for flesh or morsel. Demand fell away in the second half of the twentieth century as offal fell out of American home cooking, which is why a dish once considered plain enough for a household cookbook now requires a special trip to the butcher.