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Calf's Sweetbreads
2 calf's sweetbreads. 1/2 pint (1 cup) milk. 2 calf's sweetbreads 1/2 pint (I cup) milk 1 teaspoonful chopped parsley 1/2 pint (1 cup) white sauce Salt and pepper Wash the sweetbreads and soak them in cold water for one hour. Drain them and put them into a saucepan, cover with cold water, and bring to the boil. Lift them into another saucepan, cover with the milk, let them simmer for twenty minutes. Trim them and remove all the fat and gristle.
Warm the sauce in a casserole, season it nicely, put in the sweetbreads cut in slices, and cook slowly until they are tender.
Sprinkle the chopped parsley on the top and serve hot.
I chicken breast
A gentle nursery-and-sickroom dish that depends almost entirely on careful cleaning. Everything else is a short simmer and a plain white sauce.
- Buy the right glandButchers sell heart and throat sweetbreads; the throat sweetbread is the thymus and the round, compact heart sweetbread the pancreas, which is usually reckoned the better one, though the recipe does not say which to use. They often have to be ordered ahead and may come frozen; they should smell clean and look pale pink, not grey.
- The hinge is the membraneTrim while the sweetbreads are still warm from the blanching water, not cold. The outer membrane and the threads of fat and gristle peel away easily at that point and cling stubbornly once chilled. Any membrane left on tightens in the sauce and makes the slices chewy.
- Soaking and blanchingThe hour in cold water draws out blood; change the water once or twice if it clouds. The recipe moves them straight from the boil into milk, but plunging them into cold water for a minute first firms them and makes slicing cleaner.
- "Casserole" hereAs used in this recipe a casserole is a lidded flameproof pot worked on the stovetop, not a baked dish. A heavy saucepan or small Dutch oven does the same work.
- Half a pintThe book equates half a pint with one cup, so read it as 8 fl oz throughout even though a British half pint is properly 10. One cup of milk barely covers two sweetbreads; use enough to cover and accept the slight excess.
- White sauceOne cup means a plain white sauce: 1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon flour, 1 cup milk, cooked out for a few minutes. Some of the milk the sweetbreads simmered in can replace part of the milk and gives more flavour.
- Final cooking timeAfter twenty minutes in milk the slices are already cooked through. "Cook slowly until tender" means five to ten minutes to warm through and marry with the sauce; a long stew turns the texture from creamy to rubbery.
- Stray line and yieldThe trailing "1 chicken breast" belongs to the following recipe and has slipped into this one; ignore it. Two sweetbreads make two modest invalid portions, or one ordinary serving.
Sweetbreads were regarded as one of the most digestible of meats, bland, soft and easily eaten by someone with no appetite, which is why they appear so often in Victorian and Edwardian sickroom cookery beside beef tea, calf's foot jelly and steamed fish. "Sweetbread" is the butcher's name for the thymus and pancreas of a young animal; the word is old and its etymology is unsettled, though it is generally traced to the sweetness of the flesh rather than to any bread. Veal sweetbreads were expensive restaurant fare at the same time they were prescribed to the sick, which says something about how thoroughly the two worlds overlapped in a household that could afford both a cook and a doctor. Offal of this kind fell out of everyday British and American cooking after the middle of the twentieth century and has largely returned only through restaurant menus.