Home › Entrees › Sweetbread Ramequins
Sweetbread Ramequins
Clean and parboil a sweetbread and cut in cubes. Melt two tablespoons butter, add three tablespoons flour, and pour on gradually one cup chicken stock. Reheat sweetbread in sauce and add one-fourth cup heavy cream and one and one-half teaspoons beef extract. Season with salt, paprika, and lemon juice. Fill ramequin dishes, cover with buttered crumbs, and bake until crumbs are brown.
A small, rich entree from the era when sweetbreads were standard dinner-party fare. The recipe assumes you know how to prepare a sweetbread from raw, which is the part that actually takes work.
- The hinge: preparing the sweetbread"Clean and parboil" compresses several steps. Soak the sweetbread in several changes of cold water (or lightly salted water) for two to three hours to draw out blood, then simmer 15-20 minutes in water with a splash of lemon juice or vinegar, plunge into ice water, and peel away the membrane and any tubes. Press it between two plates under a weight for an hour and it will cube neatly instead of crumbling.
- What a sweetbread isThe thymus (throat) or pancreas (heart) gland of a calf or lamb, not a sweet and not a bread. Veal heart sweetbreads are the rounder, finer-textured ones and are worth the premium. Order ahead from a butcher; they are highly perishable and should be soaked and parboiled the day you buy them.
- Ramequin dishesIndividual ramekins of about 4 to 6 ounces. The recipe gives no yield; one sweetbread with this quantity of sauce will fill roughly three or four small dishes as a first course, or two as a light lunch.
- Beef extractA thick, dark meat concentrate — Bovril, Liebig's, or the modern equivalent. It is intensely salty, so add it before the salt and taste before adding any. A teaspoon and a half in one cup of sauce is assertive; start with one.
- The sauce proportionsTwo tablespoons butter to three tablespoons flour makes a stiff roux, and one cup of stock gives a very thick sauce that will hold the cubes suspended rather than pooling. That is intentional for a baked ramekin. If it seizes into paste, thin with a little more stock.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Bake at 400F for 12 to 15 minutes — the filling is already hot and cooked, so the oven is only browning the crumbs. A minute under the broiler finishes them if they are stubborn.
- Buttered crumbsFresh soft crumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly a tablespoon of butter to a half cup of crumbs. Dry commercial crumbs will brown before they take on any butter flavour.
- SeasoningThe lemon juice is not optional garnish — sweetbread in a cream and beef-extract sauce is flat without acid. Add it off the heat, a teaspoon at a time, until the richness lifts.
Sweetbreads occupied a curious position in American cooking around 1900: genuine offal, but delicate, pale and mild enough to be served to ladies at luncheon, which put them alongside creamed chicken and lobster Newburg in the entree chapter rather than among the plain meats. Cookbooks of the period give a long run of sweetbread dishes — braised, larded, in croustades, in patty shells — and this ramekin version is the domestic-economy end of the range, stretching a single expensive gland with a flour-thickened stock sauce and browned crumbs. The beef extract is a period marker in itself: bottled meat concentrates, developed commercially in the mid-nineteenth century and sold as both a cooking aid and an invalid tonic, were used exactly this way, to give a pale white sauce the savour and colour of long-simmered stock in a household that did not have long-simmered stock on hand. American consumption of sweetbreads fell steeply after the mid-twentieth century, and they are now a restaurant item ordered from a butcher rather than a weeknight entree.