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Fried Sweetbreads
For every mode of dressing they should be prepared by, half boiling, and then putting them in cold water ; this makes them whiter and firmer. Dip in beaten egg and then in bread crumbs, pepper and salt and fry in drippings.
Serve with peas or tomatoes.
A terse set of instructions that assumes the cook already knows what sweetbreads are and how to handle them. Two steps the original leaves out — soaking and pressing — do most of the work.
- What you are buyingSweetbreads are the thymus (throat) and pancreas (heart or belly) glands of a calf or lamb, not a sweet and not a bread. Veal heart sweetbreads are the plump, rounded ones and the better choice for frying; expect to order them, as few supermarkets stock them.
- Soak firstThe recipe skips it, but sweetbreads should sit in several changes of cold water for a few hours, refrigerated, until the water runs clear. This draws out blood and is the difference between pale, mild glands and ones that taste metallic.
- "Half boiling"This means blanching, not cooking through: bring to a bare simmer in salted water with a splash of vinegar or lemon and hold 3 to 5 minutes, until firm on the outside. The cold-water plunge that follows sets them and lets you peel away the outer membrane and any fat or tubes.
- Press themA step some period recipes call for. After blanching and peeling, lay the sweetbreads between two plates with a weight on top and chill an hour or more; they compact into an even slab that slices cleanly and browns evenly.
- DrippingsBeef or bacon drippings were the standard frying fat of the era. Clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, gives the same browning without the strong flavour; a shallow pan at moderately high heat, 3 to 4 minutes a side, is enough since the meat is already part-cooked.
- Season the crumbsThe pepper and salt belong in the crumbs, and season the egg too. Blanched sweetbreads are extremely mild and taste flat if the seasoning is only on the surface.
- YieldAround 1½ lb of sweetbreads, trimmed, serves four as a main course. They are rich; the peas or tomatoes are there to cut them, and something acidic — a squeeze of lemon at the table — does the same job.
- TimingSweetbreads do not keep. Buy them the day you cook them, or the day before at most, and keep the soaking and blanching stages in the refrigerator.
Sweetbreads were common butcher's meat in the period, and delicate enough to count as an invalid or company dish — a combination that appealed to household writers. The name has nothing to do with either sweetness or bread; one suggested derivation is the Old English bræd, meaning flesh, though the origin of the word is genuinely uncertain. The instruction to blanch and then plunge into cold water recurs in many nineteenth-century cookbooks, and it is placed here at the head of the entry because it applies to "every mode of dressing" — broiled, creamed, larded or fried. That sweetbreads have since become a restaurant item rather than a household staple is often attributed to the decline of whole-animal butchery.