Lambs' Sweetbreads
INGREDIENTS for small entrée. -2 sweetbreads, 1 egg, bread-crumbs, 1/2 pint of gravy, 3 tablespoonfuls of sherry. AVERAGE COST, 3s. 6d. . 6d.
Soak the sweetbreads in cold water for an hour, then throw them into boiling water to render them firm. Stew them gently for 15 minutes, then take them out and put them in a cloth for all the water to drain off. Brush them over with beaten yolk of egg, cover them with bread-crumbs and brown them before the fire or fry them in hot fat. Make the gravy hot and season it, if necessary, with pepper and salt, add the sherry and pour over the sweetbreads in an entrée dish or one deep enough to hold the gravy.
TIME. Rather more than hour.
SEASONABLE from Easter to Michaelmas.
Landrail, Roast, or Corn- Crake. INGREDIENTS. -3 or 4 birds, but ter, fried bread-crumbs.
Pluck and draw the birds, wipe them inside and out with a damp cloth and truss them in the following manner: Bring the head round under the wing, and the thighs LANDRAIL. close to the sides; pass a skewer through them and the body and keep the legs straight. Roast them before a clear fire, keep them well basted and serve on fried bread-crumbs, with a tureen of brown gravy. When liked, bread sauce may also be sent to table with them.
LARDING.
TIME.-12 to 20 minutes.
SEASONABLE from August 12th to the middle of September.
Two recipes run together on this page: a small entrée of lambs' sweetbreads, which is still perfectly good cooking, and roast landrail, which is not. Notes on both follow.
- The landrail is the problemThe landrail or corn-crake (Crex crex) is red-listed as a bird of high conservation concern, protected in Britain and across Europe, with a British breeding population of only about a thousand calling males, confined largely to the Hebrides, plus a small Irish population. Killing, taking or possessing one is an offence, and the August 12th to mid-September "season" quoted here no longer exists in any form. Nothing on this page can lawfully or defensibly be made with corn-crake.
- Sweetbreads: which glandButchers sell two kinds. The throat sweetbread is the thymus, long and irregular; the stomach or belly sweetbread is the pancreas, rounder. Either suits this recipe; lamb's are smaller and cook faster than veal.
- Soaking and firmingThe hour in cold water draws out blood and is worth doing, with a change or two of water. Dropping them into boiling water sets the flesh so the outer membrane and any gristle can be pulled away cleanly once they have cooled enough to handle -- do that trimming before crumbing.
- Press them, not just drain"Put them in a cloth for all the water to drain off" can be read as shorthand for the fuller treatment found in other books of the period: wrap in a cloth, lay flat between two plates with a weight on top and leave until cold. Pressed sweetbreads slice neatly and hold their crumb coating; unpressed ones sag.
- Half a pint of gravyAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. Any well-reduced brown stock or veal gravy answers; the three tablespoons of sherry go in at the end, off the boil, so the wine keeps its scent.
- "Brown them before the fire"That means a hot open grate. A grill at high heat, or shallow frying in clarified butter until the crumbs are deep gold, gives the same result -- three or four minutes a side is plenty since the sweetbreads are already cooked through.
- Entrée dish and yieldAn entrée in this book is a served course between fish and roast, not a main plate. The recipe gives no yield; two lambs' sweetbreads make a small course for two or so. Scale up freely, as the method is unchanged.
- The dates and the price"Easter to Michaelmas" runs from spring to September 29th, the old season for young lamb. Three shillings and sixpence was a substantial sum for a small course, which tells you sweetbreads were a luxury offal even then.
Sweetbreads occupied an odd rung in the Victorian kitchen: offal, and therefore cheap in principle, but so scarce -- two glands per animal, quickly spoiled -- that they were priced and served like a delicacy, appearing as an entrée in exactly the position a French kitchen would have used ris d'agneau. The name has nothing to do with bread or sweetness; it is generally traced to Old English bræd, meaning flesh, with "sweet" distinguishing the mild glands from stronger offal. Their neighbour on this page tells a bleaker story. The landrail was once common enough in English hay meadows that its rasping call was a summer commonplace and a few birds could be had for the table without remark; the shift to earlier, mechanised mowing through the twentieth century destroyed nests and chicks on a scale the species never recovered from, and it survives in Britain only where late cutting is deliberately maintained. A recipe that assumed three or four birds could be plucked for a single course now reads as a record of what has gone.