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Broiled Sweetbread
Parboil a sweetbread, split cross-wise, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and broil five minutes. Serve with Lemon Butter.
Fannie Farmer assumes you know what "parboil a sweetbread" involves, because the book explains it elsewhere. The whole success of the dish rests on that preliminary work.
- What a sweetbread isTraditionally the thymus of a calf, taken in two parts: the round, solid "heart" (thoracic) lobe and the looser "throat" lobe; the pancreas is also sold as a sweetbread. The heart lobe is generally preferred for broiling, as it holds together when split. Order ahead from a butcher; supermarket meat counters rarely stock them.
- Soak firstBefore any parboiling, soak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water for two to three hours, or refrigerate overnight in salted water, until they lose their pink tinge. Skipping this leaves the finished meat livery and grey.
- Parboil, properlySimmer 15 to 20 minutes in water acidulated with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar per quart, then plunge into ice water. This firms the gland so it can be handled. Peel away the outer membrane and any fat or tubes while still cool and damp.
- Press before broilingPressing appears in a number of period sweetbread recipes, though it is not called for here: lay the blanched sweetbread between two plates with a weight on top and chill for an hour. Pressing compacts the tissue so the split halves broil more evenly instead of curling.
- "Split cross-wise"Most likely a cut through the thickness of the lobe into two flat slabs rather than into two chunks, though the book does not elaborate. Slabs of roughly half an inch will take heat to the centre in the five minutes given; much thicker and they will not.
- The broilerThe recipe does not describe the apparatus. Under a modern overhead element, brush both faces with melted butter, set the rack three to four inches from the heat, and turn once, staying within the five minutes the recipe allows.
- Lemon ButterThe book's own accompaniment: butter creamed with lemon juice and a little salt and cayenne, set on the hot meat to melt. Roughly a quarter cup of butter to a tablespoon of juice makes enough for two sweetbreads.
- YieldOne pair of sweetbreads, around three quarters of a pound before trimming, serves two as a light main course or four as a first course.
Sweetbreads were a fixture of respectable American tables from the 1870s through the 1920s, sitting in the same bracket as terrapin and canvasback duck: not cheap, not filling, but a mark that the household knew what it was doing. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book gives them a run of preparations, of which broiling is the plainest. The thymus shrinks as the animal matures, and only milk-fed calves supply glands worth eating. The name has nothing to do with bread or with sweetness; it is generally traced to the older sense of "bread" meaning a piece of roast meat, with "sweet" distinguishing the mild-flavoured gland from more strongly flavoured offal, though the derivation is not settled. Their long decline in the United States followed the general retreat from organ meats after the Second World War, though they never left French and Italian restaurant menus.