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Sweetbreads
Wash sweetbreads and soak in slightly salted water for one hour. Plunge them in boiling salted water and boil three minutes. Place in cooker for two hours. Then plunge them in cold water; when chilled, remove membrane. They may be rolled in crumbs and egg and fried, or broken in small pieces to cream.
A method rather than a finished dish: the recipe blanches and slow-cooks sweetbreads, then leaves you to decide whether they end up fried or creamed. Nearly everything here still holds, with one large caveat about the cooking vessel.
- What a fireless cooker wasAn insulated box holding preheated soapstone or iron discs; food was brought to a boil on the stove, then sealed in to finish on stored heat. Two hours in the box corresponds to a long, gentle poach with the temperature falling steadily from boiling.
- On the modern stoveAfter the three-minute blanch, poach the sweetbreads in barely trembling water, about 170-180F, for 15 to 20 minutes depending on size. They are done when firm and opaque throughout. Two hours of modern simmering would reduce them to cotton.
- Temperature driftIf you do use a haybox, slow cooker or similar, check with a thermometer that the water stays above 140F for the whole two hours. Offal held for hours in cooling water is the one genuine weak point in this method.
- The soak mattersThe hour in salted water purges blood and is the difference between pale, delicate sweetbreads and grey ones. Change the water once if it colours heavily.
- Membrane while coldPeel only after the cold plunge, as the recipe says. The outer membrane lifts away cleanly from chilled, firm sweetbreads and tears the flesh if you attack it warm.
- Press themNot in the original, but standard practice: after chilling, lay the peeled sweetbreads between two plates with a weight on top for an hour. They slice evenly and brown better.
- Which glandButchers sell veal thymus (the throat sweetbread) and pancreas (the heart or stomach sweetbread). Order ahead; these are rarely on display.
- Crumbs and eggThe order is flour, then beaten egg, then crumbs. Fry in clarified butter or a neutral oil over moderate heat until golden, three or four minutes a side, since the interior is already cooked.
- YieldOne pair of veal sweetbreads runs roughly 3/4 to 1 lb and serves two as a main course, or four creamed on toast or in patty shells.
Sweetbreads were a fixture of respectable American and British cooking from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1920s, valued as much for delicacy as for flavour: they turn up constantly in invalid and convalescent cookery, in luncheon menus, and creamed in pastry shells at ladies' teas. The name is old and its origin is only traditionally explained, usually by tracing "bread" to an Old English word for flesh, with "sweet" distinguishing the mild glands from stronger organ meats. Their appearance in a fireless cookery chapter says as much about the period as about the dish: insulated cookers were promoted hard in the 1900s and 1910s as fuel-savers and labour-savers, letting a cook start something before leaving the kitchen.