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Creamed Sweetbread
Parboil a sweetbread, and cut in one-half inch cubes, or separate in small pieces. Reheat in one cup White Sauce II. Creamed Sweetbread may be served on toast, or used as filling for patty cases or Swedish Timbales.
Farmer assumes you know two things she explains elsewhere: how to prepare a sweetbread and what White Sauce II is. Both are worth spelling out.
- White Sauce IIIn Farmer's numbered scheme this is the medium-thick sauce, on the order of 2 tablespoons each butter and flour to a cup of milk with salt and pepper; check the book's own sauce section for its exact proportions. Cook the roux a minute or two before adding the milk so it does not taste pasty, and season more assertively than you think you need — sweetbread is very mild.
- The step that mattersParboiling is not a formality. Soak the sweetbread in several changes of cold water for an hour to draw out blood, then simmer 15 to 20 minutes in salted water with a spoonful of lemon juice or vinegar, and plunge it straight into ice water. Chilled and firm, the outer membrane and any tubes peel away cleanly; warm, they shred and the pieces fall apart.
- What to buy"Sweetbreads" covers two glands: the elongated "throat" sweetbread, which is the thymus, and the rounder, generally better-regarded "heart" or belly sweetbread, which is the pancreas. Either may have to be ordered ahead. It is one of the most perishable things in the shop — buy it cold, keep it cold, and cook it the day you get it.
- YieldA veal sweetbread of roughly half a pound to a pound before trimming will serve two, perhaps three as a filling for patty cases. The cup of sauce specified suits about that quantity.
- ReheatingFold the cubes into the finished hot sauce and bring it barely to a simmer, two or three minutes, only until heated through. Holding it at a boil tightens the meat and turns its texture chalky.
- Swedish TimbalesNot a custard — in this book they are thin batter shells fried crisp on a timbale iron. Puff-pastry vol-au-vent cases or plain buttered toast do the same job.
- Availability noteBecause of BSE-era rules, veal thymus is restricted or unavailable in some countries and some retailers avoid it entirely. Check what your butcher can legally sell before planning the dish.
Sweetbreads were the polite luxury of late nineteenth-century American cooking: expensive, bland, pale, and endlessly adaptable, which is why Fannie Farmer gives them several treatments and treats creaming as the plainest of them. The name has nothing to do with bread or sugar; it is generally traced to an older sense of bread meaning a piece of flesh, with "sweet" distinguishing it from the strong-tasting organs like liver and kidney. Creamed dishes bound in a measured white sauce were the backbone of the Boston Cooking School method — Farmer numbered her sauces by thickness, a system that seems designed to let a cook be sent to any recipe in the book with one instruction — and this entry shows the system at work: parboil, cube, reheat in Sauce II, then choose toast, pastry, or a fried timbale shell depending on how formal the meal was. Offal of this kind slipped out of American home cooking after the Second World War, and sweetbreads survive now mostly on restaurant menus and in French and Italian kitchens.