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Baked Fillets of Sweetbreads
Prepare six fillets; sprinkle with salt and pepper and dredge with flour. Arrange on slices of bacon; dot with butter; baste with cream while baking in a hot oven. Serve with Béchamel Sauce.
Four lines of text that assume you already know how to handle sweetbreads. Everything that matters happens before the oven.
- "Prepare six fillets" is the whole jobSweetbreads must be soaked in several changes of cold water until they run pale, then blanched about 15 minutes in acidulated water, plunged into ice water, and peeled of membrane and gristle. Press the cleaned lobes between two plates under a weight for an hour, then slice or split into flat fillets. Skipping the press gives you a floppy, uneven piece that will not brown.
- Buy the right glandThe heart (or stomach) sweetbread of a milk-fed veal is the prize: round, firm, pale. Throat sweetbreads are stringier. Order ahead from a butcher; they are rarely on display. The recipe gives no weight; six fillets would plausibly come from somewhere in the region of 1 1/2 lb of raw sweetbreads.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperature. 'Hot oven' in period usage is generally taken as somewhere around 400-450F, hot enough that the flour and butter crust sets quickly. Blanching has already cooked the sweetbreads through, so the oven time should be short; you are browning, not cooking from raw.
- The bacon is a rack, not a garnishLaying the fillets on bacon keeps them off the hot pan bottom and off their own rendered liquid. Use thin-cut streaky bacon and expect it to be soft rather than crisp when the sweetbreads are done.
- Basting with creamAdd the cream a spoonful at a time, three or four times during baking, rather than pouring it all in at the start, where in a hot oven it is liable to scorch and break. What collects in the pan is worth scraping into the sauce.
- BéchamelBechamel -- the book carries its own recipe. A Bechamel of this period is generally butter and flour cooked without colour, then milk (sometimes with white stock), seasoned with salt, pepper and a little onion or nutmeg. Keep it loose enough to pour, since sweetbreads are rich and a thick sauce buries them.
- YieldSix fillets serve six as a light entree course in the period sense, or three as a modern main. Toast points or peas are common accompaniments in recipes of the period.
Sweetbreads, the thymus and pancreas of a calf, were a standard entrée in American cooking from the 1870s through the 1920s, and appear in almost every general cookbook of the era, usually larded and baked, creamed in patty shells, or broiled on skewers with bacon. They occupied the same place on a menu that a delicate fish or a chicken croquette did: mild, pale, expensive, and read as refined precisely because they required careful preparation. Lowney's Cook Book (1907), compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, is remembered for its confectionery, but it also aimed to be a complete household manual, which is why a full run of French-influenced entrées sits alongside the cocoa recipes. The terseness here is striking: the instructions cover only what distinguishes this treatment from others, and say nothing about how to blanch and press a sweetbread.