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Sweetbreads Fricasseed
462. Cut up the remnants of a cooked sweetbread in small portions, and prepare a sauce or gravy as in stewing either white or brown; lay the sweetbread in the pan with the gravy, and give one boil up. Garnish with slices of lemon or sippets of bread.
A use-up dish rather than a project: it assumes you already have poached or braised sweetbreads left from an earlier meal and a saucepan of gravy at hand. Everything depends on treating the meat as already cooked.
- The hinge: one boil, no moreThe sweetbread is fully cooked before it goes in; the boil is only to bring the sauce and meat to temperature together. Held at a simmer for even ten minutes the pieces tighten and go grainy, losing the soft set that is the whole point of them.
- What a sweetbread isThe thymus (throat sweetbread) or pancreas (heart or stomach sweetbread) of a calf or lamb. Butchers rarely stock them unprompted; order ahead, and expect veal thymus as the default in Britain and the United States.
- If you are starting from rawThis recipe does not cover the first cooking. Raw sweetbreads need soaking in several changes of cold water until the water runs clear, a brief blanch, then peeling of the outer membrane before poaching or braising. Skipping the soak leaves them bloody and metallic.
- "White or brown"White means a velouté built on veal or chicken stock, often finished with cream and lemon; brown means a reduced meat gravy. The book's own stewing recipes are the reference point.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread, toasted or fried until crisp, arranged round the edge of the dish. They soak up sauce and give some texture against the soft meat.
- Reheating safelyCooked offal should be cooled quickly, refrigerated, and used within a day or two. Bring the sauce to a full boil before the meat goes in so the whole panful comes up to temperature promptly rather than sitting lukewarm.
- YieldOne veal sweetbread trimmed and cooked gives roughly 200-250 g of meat, enough for two as a light course.
Sweetbreads sat near the top of the Victorian offal hierarchy, well above liver in price, and were often prescribed for invalids and children on the grounds that they were delicate and easily digested. That expense helps explain the recipe's premise: little of a sweetbread was thrown away, and a fricassee -- a term used loosely in nineteenth-century English cookery, sometimes for small pieces of already-cooked meat reheated in a sauce -- was one way to bring yesterday's remnants back to table. The garnish instructions are the period's shorthand for making a made-over dish look deliberate, lemon for a white sauce, crisp sippets for either. British consumption fell in the later twentieth century, and BSE-era controls on bovine offal from 1989 onwards made beef sweetbreads harder to come by, which is part of why a dish this casual now reads as restaurant food.