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Some Kitchen Kinks: Sweetbreads
Before Broiled Sweetbreads. sweetbreads are prepared in any way, they have to be parboiled.
When they come from the market, put them into ice water and let them stand an hour, then drop in boiling salted water to which a tablespoonful of lemon juice has been added. This preserves the white color of the sweetbread, and keeps the flesh firm.
After cooking slowly for twenty minutes, drop them in ice water and pull off the skin, fiber, and all waste scraps, divide into pieces, and they are ready to serve as desired. They make a very savory dish for the invalid's tray when broiled. Do not separate them when cooking this way, but cut in slices, sprinkle with salt and pepper, brush with melted butter, and broil a delicate brown. Season with pepper, salt, and lemon juice, and, if the doctor allows it, a tablespoonful of tomato sauce.
Sweetbreads are delicious when creamed. When served in this way they are simply reheated in a white sauce, as directed for creamed chicken, and poured over buttered toast. If you have a small portion left of both chicken and sweetbread, it makes a delicious dish blended with cream sauce. They are also nice reheated in a cup of strong chicken stock with a dash of lemon juice for seasoning.
Golden-rod Eggs.-Prepare a white sauce as given in the recipe for creamed chicken. Add to it the white of a hard-boiled egg, chopped.
Pour this mixture over a slice of toast, and on top scatter the hardboiled yolk rubbed into tiny strings through a sieve. Serve very hot Egg Sandwiches. - Boil an egg hard and chop fine; add salt, mustard, a few drops of vinegar, and a dash of pepper for seasoning. Soften tablespoonful of butter, beat to a cream, and mix the egg with it till it is a paste. Butter slices of bread, spread on the mixture, and make into a sandwich.
French Chops. - Trim from the bones of tender, little lamb chops all the fat and skin, leaving nothing but the tiny round of meat at the end.
Brush with butter, dust with pepper and salt, and broil over a hot fire.
Four short recipes run together here, all of them built around the same idea: mild, quickly cooked protein for a light meal or a sickroom tray. The sweetbread instructions are the substantial part, and the parboil is what makes or breaks them.
- The hinge: soak, blanch, then chill hardThe cold soak draws out blood, the acidulated blanch sets the flesh so it can be peeled, and the return to ice water is what lets the membrane come away in one sheet. Skip the final chilling and you will shred the sweetbread trying to skin it.
- What you are buyingSweetbreads are the thymus ("throat") and pancreas ("heart" or "belly") of a calf or lamb, and are generally a butcher's order rather than a supermarket item, often sold frozen. A pair of veal sweetbreads is roughly a pound and will serve two or three.
- Twenty minutes is for vealA full 20 minutes at a bare simmer suits thick veal sweetbreads. Lamb sweetbreads are much smaller and are done in 5 to 8 minutes; longer and they turn grainy.
- Press them if you want neat slicesThe book does not mention it, but standard practice after peeling is to lay the sweetbreads between two plates with a weight on top and chill an hour. They compact and slice cleanly for broiling.
- BroilingPreheat the broiler fully and work close to the element, 3 to 4 inches, for 3 to 4 minutes a side. The sweetbread is already cooked through; you are only browning it.
- The white sauce it keeps referring toThe "recipe for creamed chicken" is elsewhere in the book. Any standard white sauce does the job: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, cooked until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt and white pepper.
- Golden-rod eggs, quantitiesNone are given. One hard-boiled egg and about 1/2 cup of sauce dresses one slice of toast. Push the yolk through a fine sieve while it is still slightly warm or it crumbles rather than threads.
- French chops"Frenched" means scraped clean to the bone, which butchers still do on request. Rib chops that small cook in 2 to 3 minutes a side under a hot broiler and should come out pink at the center.
- "If the doctor allows it"The sweetbread directions are pitched at the sickroom tray, and the seasoning there is deliberately restrained. Cooking them for well people, treat the tomato sauce, mustard and lemon as a floor rather than a ceiling.
Sweetbreads belong to the long tradition of invalid cookery, which occupied whole chapters of turn-of-the-century household manuals: bland, soft, easily digested dishes thought suitable for the sick, the elderly and children, served on a tray and judged as much by appearance as flavor, hence the fuss over preserving the white color with lemon juice. The name's origin is unsettled; it is generally traced to an older sense of "bread" meaning a piece or morsel of flesh, with "sweet" distinguishing it from the strong-tasting organs, though no explanation is documented with certainty. That such offal reads as a delicacy now and as convalescent food then says something about how completely the American meat trade has changed. "Golden-rod eggs" takes its name from the sieved yolk scattered over the sauce, meant to look like the flowering weed.