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Creamed Sweetbreads (Pair sweetbreads tablespoon)
1 pair sweetbreads 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon flour 1 cup milk or cream Salt and pepper 1 tablespoon parsley Prepare the sweetbreads and break them into small pieces. Make a white sauce, add the sweetbreads, and as soon as they are heated, season. Serve in pastry shells or on toast.
A short entry that assumes the cook already knows how to bring sweetbreads to the table-ready stage. That omitted step is most of the work.
- "Prepare the sweetbreads" means four thingsSoak them in several changes of cold water for an hour or two until they lose their pinkness, then simmer gently in salted, acidulated water about 15-20 minutes, plunge into ice water, and peel away the outer membrane and any tubes or fat. Only then are they ready to be broken into pieces. Skipping the soak leaves a bloody, metallic taste.
- What a pair isVeal sweetbreads are sold as a pair — the elongated throat sweetbread and the rounder heart sweetbread — weighing roughly 3/4 to 1 lb together. Today they are often sold by weight rather than as a matched pair, and the heart lobe is the piece most likely to be offered; ask for about a pound.
- The white sauce is thin by designOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to a full cup of liquid gives a pouring sauce, not a thick binding one. Cook the roux a minute without browning, add the milk gradually, and let it simmer two or three minutes so it does not taste of raw flour.
- Reheat onlyThe sweetbreads are already cooked through from the blanching. "As soon as they are heated" is literal — a minute or two in the hot sauce. Held longer they tighten and lose the soft, custardy texture that is the whole point.
- Cream versus milkThe recipe treats the two as interchangeable. Cream gives a richer sauce; whole milk will taste leaner. Half-and-half is a reasonable middle.
- ParsleyA tablespoon of chopped fresh parsley, stirred in at the end off the heat so it stays green. Dried parsley contributes nothing here.
- Pastry shellsBaked individual pastry cases, of the sort now sold as vol-au-vent or patty shells. Fill them at the last moment or the sauce softens the pastry.
- YieldEnough for three or four servings as a light entree, or six as a first course in small shells.
Sweetbreads — the thymus and pancreas of a calf, never the brain despite the name — were a standard genteel entree in American cookbooks from roughly the 1870s through the 1930s: a delicate course stretched with a cup of white sauce and served in a pastry case so a small quantity fed a table. The word's origin is not documented with any certainty; it is generally traced to "sweet" for the mild flavor and an older sense of "bread" meaning a piece of flesh. Creamed dishes on toast were a workhorse formula of this era of home cooking. Sweetbreads fell out of ordinary American use after mid-century, and now turn up mainly in restaurants and at butchers who will order them for you.