Home › Company and Sunday Dinner Menus › Broiled Sweetbreads
Broiled Sweetbreads
Parboil the sweetbreads, remove any membranes, slice lengthwise, sprinkle with salt and pepper, place slices on hot broiler under quick fire and broil five minutes, turning once; remove to hot platter and serve with peas and toast.
A short set of directions that assumes you already know how to handle sweetbreads. The parboiling and pressing step, glossed here in two words, is where the dish is actually won or lost.
- What you are buyingSweetbreads are the thymus (throat) and pancreas (heart or stomach) glands of a calf or lamb. The heart sweetbread is the plumper, rounder one and the usual choice for broiling. They often have to be ordered ahead.
- Soak before you parboilCover in several changes of cold water, or lightly salted water, for two to three hours in the refrigerator until the pink has drawn out. Sweetbreads left unsoaked broil up grey and bloody-looking.
- The parboil, in numbersSimmer gently for 15 to 20 minutes in water acidulated with a little lemon juice or vinegar — never a hard boil, which breaks the gland apart. Drop straight into ice water to firm up.
- Press themAfter the ice bath, lay the sweetbreads flat between two plates or trays with a weight on top and chill for an hour. This is the step the recipe skips, and it is what gives you slices that hold together and brown evenly rather than crumbling on the broiler.
- MembranesPeel the outer membrane and any tubes away while the sweetbreads are still cool and damp; it lifts off in sheets after parboiling. Membrane left on shrinks under heat and curls the slices.
- "Quick fire"A broiler brought up to full heat, with the meat two to three inches from the element. Brush the slices with melted butter or oil first, as parboiled sweetbreads are lean and dry.
- Five minutes is rightAfter the simmer the sweetbreads are largely cooked, so the broiling is mainly for colour and flavour. Two to three minutes a side, as the recipe's "five minutes, turning once" implies; longer dries the interior.
- YieldOne pair of veal sweetbreads, generally around a pound, serves two as a main course. The peas and toast in the original are not garnish so much as the whole rest of the plate.
Sweetbreads were standard company fare in American and British households from the middle of the nineteenth century through the 1930s — they were expensive, delicate, and understood as a compliment to a guest. The name has nothing to do with bread or sugar; "sweet" is generally read as distinguishing the mild taste of the gland from ordinary muscle meat, with "bread" often traced to an Old English word for a piece of roast meat, though the etymology is not settled. Broiling with peas and toast was among the plainest of the standard treatments; period cookbooks also creamed them, braised them in a white sauce, or larded and roasted them. American demand fell away after the middle of the twentieth century as offal left domestic cooking, and sweetbreads became a special order at the butcher's counter.