Home › Meat › Creamed Sweetbreads
Creamed Sweetbreads
2 pairs sweetbreads
1 teaspoon minced parsley
4 tablespoons butter or other
2 cups milk or cream fat
Salt and pepper
4 tablespoons flour
Prepare as directed and cut into dice. Make a white sauce with the fat, flour and milk or cream, add the sweetbreads, and stir steadily until very hot. Season with salt and pepper and minced parsley.
A plain medium-thick white sauce carrying diced sweetbreads. Everything depends on the step the book leaves to an earlier page: "prepare as directed" means soaked, blanched, trimmed and pressed before they ever meet the sauce.
- What a sweetbread isUsually the thymus gland of a young animal, most often veal, occasionally lamb; the pancreas is also sold as a sweetbread. "Two pairs" means four glands, perhaps 1 1/2 to 2 lb of veal sweetbreads. They generally need ordering ahead from a butcher and are best used soon after purchase.
- The preparation the recipe assumesThe book's earlier directions are not on this page, but the usual period method runs: soak in several changes of cold water for an hour or two until they lose their blood, then simmer 15 to 20 minutes in salted water with a spoonful of lemon juice or vinegar. Drain, cool, and pull off the outer membrane and any tubes, then press between two plates under a weight until cold and firm. Only then dice.
- Do not skip the pressingChilling under weight is what lets sweetbreads be cut into clean dice instead of collapsing into threads in the sauce. Warm, unpressed sweetbreads shred as soon as you stir them.
- The sauce proportions4 tablespoons each of fat and flour to 2 cups liquid is a medium-thick white sauce. Cook the roux a minute or two without colouring it, add the milk gradually, and let it boil briefly to lose the raw flour taste before the sweetbreads go in.
- Heat, not cookingThe sweetbreads are already cooked from the blanching. "Stir steadily until very hot" means five minutes at most; longer and they turn dense and grainy. Keep the pan below a hard boil once they are in.
- SeasoningSalt, pepper and parsley are the whole of it as written, which is very bland by current taste. A grating of nutmeg, a squeeze of lemon, or a spoonful of sherry stirred in at the end is entirely in period and improves it.
- Yield and servingServes four to six as a main course. In the period this went onto buttered toast, into pastry shells or a rice border; it also works over noodles or in a vol-au-vent.
Creamed sweetbreads were one of the standard "delicate" dishes of American and English cooking from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1930s — light, pale, mildly flavoured, and therefore prescribed for invalids, convalescents and ladies' luncheons as well as served at dinner. Butterick's book seems intended for the household that wanted respectable company food without a professional cook, and a creamed dish in a patty shell would have been the reliable answer. The recipe's brevity, and its cross-reference to a general "prepare as directed" note, suggest how routine offal may have been in a period when glands, brains and kidneys were cheap. Veal sweetbreads are now expensive and hard to find, and the dish has largely retreated from home kitchens to restaurant menus.