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Sweetbread and Bacon
Parboil a sweetbread, cut in small pieces, dip in flour, egg, and crumbs, and arrange alternately with pieces of bacon on small skewers, having four pieces sweetbread and three of bacon on each skewer. Fry in deep fat, and drain. Arrange in a circle around mound of green peas.
SWEETBREAD À LA NAPOLI. - Page 233.
BRAISED SWEETBREADS EUGÉNIE. - Page 234.
BRESLIN POTTED CHICKEN IN CASSEROLE DISH. - Page 252. BROILED CHICKEN GARNISHED WITH FRENCH FRIED POTATOES. SLICES OF BROILED TOMATOES, PARSLEY, AND LETTUCE.
Page 245.
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A brochette of veal sweetbread and bacon, fried and set around peas. The recipe assumes you know how to handle a sweetbread, which is the part most cooks now need spelled out.
- Prepare the sweetbread firstSoak it in several changes of cold water for an hour or two until it loses its pink blush, then peel away the outer membrane and any tubes. Unsoaked, unpeeled sweetbreads fry up bloody and slightly bitter, and no amount of breading hides it.
- What "parboil" means hereSimmer in acidulated water (a spoonful of lemon juice or vinegar per quart) for 15 to 20 minutes, then plunge into cold water to firm the flesh. Pressing the cooled sweetbread under a plate for an hour gives slices that hold together on the skewer.
- Which sweetbreadA calf's thymus (throat) or pancreas (heart or stomach sweetbread); the heart sweetbread is the rounder, more compact one and the easier to cube. Expect to order from a butcher, and count roughly one 3/4 lb sweetbread for three or four skewers.
- Bacon of the periodBreakfast bacon of the era was generally more heavily cured and smoked than most supermarket bacon, and often sliced thicker. Use a thick-cut rasher, in squares about the size of the sweetbread pieces, or thin bacon folded double so it does not shrivel to nothing in the fat.
- Deep fat temperatureThe recipe says only 'deep fat'; about 375F is the usual modern equivalent. The sweetbread is largely cooked already from the parboiling, so the frying is mainly to set the crumbs and crisp the bacon: two to three minutes, turning the skewer once.
- SkewersMetal skewers are fine and short ones are better; wooden picks scorch in deep fat. Fry no more than two or three at a time so the fat holds its heat.
- Breading orderThe original's "flour, egg, and crumbs" is the sequence, not a list of options. Flour first gives the egg something to grip, and dry fine crumbs brown faster than fresh.
- Yield and servingFour skewers make a light entrée for two, or a first course for four. The mound of green peas at the center is the whole garnish; a spoonful of buttered peas per person is enough.
Sweetbreads were a delicacy of the American hotel and boarding-house dining room in the decades around 1900, and this page sits among a run of them, with the cross-references visible here to Napoli and Eugenie treatments and to the plated hotel dishes photographed in the book's plates. Threaded on small skewers, the dish belongs to the family the French call en brochette, a form American cookbooks took from restaurant service, where alternating a lean morsel with a fatty one solved the problem of a meat that has almost no fat of its own. Sweetbreads were far more familiar on the table then than now; offal drifted out of the domestic repertoire later in the century, and calf's thymus became something you must ask a butcher for by name.