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Stewed Sweetbreads
1 pair sweetbreads 1/4 cup butter 1 tablespoon flour 1 cup cream 1 tablespoon chopped parsley Wash the sweetbreads and blanch them for a few minutes in boiling water; then lay them in cold water for ten minutes. Put them in a saucepan with water to cover; stew until tender; add the quarter of a cup of butter, rubbed into the tablespoon of flour, the chopped parsley and a cup of cream. Boil three minutes and serve.
A plain creamed sweetbread of the sort that filled luncheon patty shells a century ago. The recipe assumes you know how to handle sweetbreads before they reach the pan, and skips the two steps that matter most.
- What a pair isSweetbreads are the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb; a "pair" of veal sweetbreads runs roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb. They are almost always a special order from a butcher, and they are highly perishable — use them within a day of purchase.
- Soak before you blanchThe recipe says wash, but standard practice is to soak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water for two to three hours (refrigerated) to draw out blood. This is what keeps the finished dish pale rather than grey.
- Peel after the cold waterThe unstated step. Once blanched and chilled, the outer membrane and any fatty tubes pull away easily with your fingers; left on, they toughen and shrink the meat into knots. Blanch 3 to 5 minutes, chill, peel, then press between two plates under a weight for an hour if you want the neat slices the period expected.
- "Stew until tender"About 15 to 20 minutes at a bare simmer for veal, less for lamb. They are done when a skewer meets no resistance; hard boiling makes them spongy.
- The sauce is loose by designA tablespoon of flour to a cup of cream gives a thin, pourable sauce, not a gravy. The quarter cup of butter is generous by modern taste — half that still carries the dish. Rub the butter and flour to a smooth paste before it goes in, or you will get lumps.
- Boil three minutesLong enough to take the raw edge off the flour and thicken slightly. Thin cream can curdle if driven hard, so a lively simmer with stirring is safer than a hard rolling boil.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; a pair of sweetbreads with a cup of cream would stretch to about three or four light servings. Dishes like this were commonly sent out in puff-paste shells, on buttered toast points, or in a ring of rice, with the parsley the only colour on the plate.
Sweetbreads occupied an odd place in American cooking around the turn of the twentieth century: an organ meat, but an expensive and genteel one, treated as a delicacy fit for invalids, wedding breakfasts and hotel luncheon menus. Creamed in a butter-and-flour sauce and served in a pastry shell, they were a standard of the ladies' luncheon, alongside creamed chicken and lobster Newburg — mild, pale, soft-textured food that a period cookbook considered refined. The name has nothing to do with bread or sweetness; one common suggestion links the second element to Old English br e3d, meaning flesh, though the etymology is uncertain and the force of "sweet" is conjecture rather than documented. Their fall from American tables came later, with the general retreat from variety meats after mid-century, and Mrs. Fryer's brisk assumption that a home cook could blanch and trim a pair without being told how belongs to a kitchen where they were simply another cut of meat.