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Two Heart Sweetbreads
Half a pint of good White Stock.
Take two good fresh heart sweetbreads, steep them in cold water for two hours. Put them in
The text as printed breaks off after "Put them in", so this is a fragment rather than a followable method; what survives is the ingredient list and the first stage of a standard Edwardian sweetbread preparation. The notes below cover what the surviving lines mean and what the missing steps almost certainly were.
- The recipe is incompleteNothing after the two-hour soak survives, including the blanching, trimming, cooking time and finish. Follow a current sweetbread recipe for the cooking stages and use this page for its vocabulary and its first instruction.
- Heart sweetbreadsThe "heart" or "heart-bread" sweetbread is the rounded lobe from the chest, distinguished in old butchery from the elongated "throat" sweetbread; sources differ over whether it is the thoracic lobe of the thymus or the pancreas. Butchers today usually sell them simply as sweetbreads; ask for the round chest lobes, which are firmer and more evenly shaped.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. "Good White Stock" means an unbrowned veal or chicken stock, lightly salted at most, since it will reduce.
- The soak is the hingeTwo hours in several changes of cold water draws out blood and is what keeps the finished sweetbread pale rather than grey and mottled. Change the water whenever it colours; refrigerate rather than leaving them at room temperature, which the original takes for granted.
- What normally came nextPeriod recipes commonly direct blanching the soaked sweetbreads briefly, often in acidulated water, cooling them, peeling away the membrane and fat, and in many cases pressing them flat between two plates under a weight before braising in the stock. Pressing is one reason Victorian sweetbreads are often described as neat, even shapes on the plate.
- YieldTwo heart sweetbreads serve two as a course of their own, or four as one dish among several in a longer menu.
Sweetbreads were a fixture of British and French high-class cookery, prized long before the nineteenth century, precisely because they demanded labour: soaking, blanching, skinning and pressing were servants' work. The name is generally traced to "sweet" plus the Old English br u0101d, flesh, rather than to bread in the modern sense, though the second element remains unsettled; the gland has nothing sweet about it. Cookbooks of this period carefully separate the heart or chest sweetbread, the thymus lobe named here, from the throat sweetbread, the former being reckoned the finer. Sweetbreads were generally a costly item, and recipes like this one, built on a small quantity of good white stock, belong to a style of cooking that treated delicacy of colour and texture as the mark of skill.