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Sweetbreads, Stewed
INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons.-3 sweetbreads, 1 pint of white stock, thickening of butter and flour, 6 tablespoonfuls of cream, 1 tablespoonful of lemon-juice, 1 blade of pounded mace, white pepper and salt to taste. AVERAGE COST, 4s.
Soak the sweetbreads in warm water for 1 hour, and boil them for 10 minutes; take them out, put them into cold water for a few minutes; lay them in a stewpan with the stock, and simmer them gently for rather more than hour. Dish them; thicken the gravy with a little butter and flour; let it boil up, add the remaining ingredients, allow the sauce to get quite hot, but not boil, and pour it over the sweetbreads.
TIME. To soak 1 hour, to be boiled 10 minutes, stewed rather more than 1/2 hour.
SEASONABLE. In full season from May toug u st.
Note. A few mushrooms added to this dish, and stewed with the sweetbreads, will be found an improvement.
Sweetbreads, Lambs', Larded, and Asparagus. (An Entrée.) - INGREDIENTS.-2 or 3 sweetbreads, 1/2 pint of veal stock, white pepper and salt to taste, a small bunch of green onions, 1 blade of pounded mace, thickening of butter and flour, 2 eggs, nearly 1/2 pint of cream, 1 teaspoonful of minced parsley, a very little grated nutmeg, asparagus-tops, bacon for larding. AVERAGE COST, 4s. 6d.
Soak the sweetbreads in lukewarm water, and put them into a saucepan with sufficient boiling water to cover them, and let them simmer for 10 minutes; then take them out and put them into cold water.
Now lard them, lay them in a stewpan, add the stock , seasoning, onions, mace and a thickening of butter and flour, and stew gently for hour or 20 minutes. Beat up the egg with the cream, to which add the minced parsley and a very little grated nutmeg. Put this to the other ingredients; stir it well till quite hot, but do not let it boil after the cream is added, or it will curdle. Have ready some asparagus-tops, boiled, add these to the sweetbreads, and serve.
TIME.-Altogether, 1 hour.
SWISS CREAM. and bread-crumbs, 1/2 pint of gravy, 1/2 glass of sherry. AVERAGE COST, 3s. 6d.
Soak the sweetbreads in warm water for an hour, and throw them into boiling water to render them firm. Let them stew gently for about hour, take them out and put them into a cloth to drain all the water from them. Brush them over with egg, sprinkle them with bread-crumbs, and either brown them in the oven or before the fire. Have ready the above quantity of gravy, to which add 1/2 glass of sherry dish the sweetbreads, pour the gravy under them, and garnish with watercresses.
TIME. Rather more than hour.
SEASONABLE from Easter to Michaelmas.
A Victorian white-sauce treatment of veal sweetbreads: blanch, simmer in stock, finish with cream and lemon off the boil. The hinge is that last step — once the cream and lemon juice go in, the sauce must be heated but never allowed to bubble, or the acid and heat together will curdle it.
- What a sweetbread isThe thymus (throat) or pancreas (heart or stomach) gland of a calf or lamb, not a bread and not sweet. The heart sweetbread is the rounder, firmer one and is generally reckoned the choicer; you will usually need to order them from a butcher. Three veal sweetbreads might run anywhere from about 1.5 to 3 lb depending on size.
- Soak, blanch, refreshThe hour in warm water draws out blood; the ten-minute boil and the plunge into cold water firm the gland so it can be trimmed and handled. After refreshing, peel away the outer membrane and any gristle before it goes into the stock, which the original assumes rather than states.
- White stockA pale unbrowned veal or chicken stock, unsalted and unreduced. A pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz, about 2.5 US cups. Use a low-sodium chicken stock if you are not making veal stock.
- Thickening of butter and flourBeurre manié: equal weights of soft butter and flour worked to a paste, whisked into the simmering gravy in small pieces. About 1 oz of each will lightly thicken a pint of stock; nearer twice that for a coating consistency.
- Blade of pounded maceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed; one blade pounded is roughly a scant quarter teaspoon of ground mace. Ground nutmeg at half that quantity is a workable substitute.
- Simmer, do not boilSweetbreads held at a rolling boil tighten and turn granular. Keep the stock at a bare tremble for the 35–40 minutes indicated, and add the cream and lemon juice only after the pan is off direct heat.
- Cost and yieldThe 4s. is the Victorian household costing for the whole dish, not a modern guide. As written it serves six as a course within a larger meal; four as a main dish with the mushrooms suggested in the note.
Sweetbreads were among the most prized offal of the nineteenth-century English table, expensive enough to be treated as a luxury, and light enough in colour and flavour to belong to the white entrées served between fish and roast. The seasonality noted here — full season from May to August, and "Easter to Michaelmas" in the companion recipe — reflects the calving and lambing year: sweetbreads come from young animals and shrink as the beast matures, so they were a spring and summer luxury. The finishing method, a stock thickened with butter and flour then enriched with cream and sharpened with lemon off the heat, is the standard Victorian velouté-and-liaison in domestic dress, and the warning against boiling after the cream goes in recurs in the companion recipe printed here.