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Larded Sweetbread
Parboil a sweetbread, lard the upper side, and bake until well browned, basting with Meat Glaze.
Fannie Farmer assumes you already know how to handle a sweetbread and own a larding needle; the recipe is really three techniques compressed into one sentence. Here is what it leaves out.
- What a sweetbread isThe thymus gland of a calf; the pancreas is also sold under the same name. A pair weighs roughly 1 lb and serves two as a main course.
- Soak before you parboilSoak in several changes of cold water, an hour or more, until the water runs clear. Skipping it leaves the flesh grey and bloody rather than ivory.
- Parboil means 15-20 minutesSimmer, never boil hard, in acidulated water — a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar per quart — then plunge into ice water. Boiling makes the gland swell and split.
- Press and peelOnce cold, strip the outer membrane and any tubes. Pressing between two plates with a weight for an hour firms the gland and makes it easier to slice, though the recipe does not call for it.
- LardingThreading strips of chilled fat salt pork or fatback through the surface with a larding needle. If you have no needle, drape thin sheets of fatback or unsmoked bacon over the top and secure with toothpicks — the point is basting fat, not decoration.
- Oven heatFarmer gives none. Bake at 400F for 20-25 minutes, basting every five, until the lardons are crisp and the surface is deep brown.
- Meat GlazeGlace de viande: brown stock reduced until it coats a spoon and sets to a jelly when cold. A tablespoon or two of commercial demi-glace, loosened with a little stock, does the same work here.
- DonenessSweetbreads are already cooked through from the parboil. The bake is for colour and fat only, so pull them the moment they brown rather than waiting on a temperature.
Sweetbreads were standard middle-class fare in America when this book appeared in 1896, priced somewhere between cheap offal and prime cuts, and the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book gives a whole run of them — creamed, broiled, in croustades, in patties. Larding, the business of drawing strips of pork fat through lean meat with a long grooved needle, was a routine skill in the nineteenth-century kitchen and survives now mainly in classical cookery; it is often said to have been the usual answer to any meat with no fat of its own, and a sweetbread has almost none. The brevity of the entry is telling: Farmer wrote, it seems, for pupils presumed already familiar with blanching, pressing and glaze-making from earlier in the same volume, so a single line was enough. Veal sweetbreads have grown expensive and unfamiliar since, for reasons that are hard to pin down.