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Fried Sweetbreads
2 pairs sweetbreads
Salt and pepper
2 tablespoons flour
Egg
1 cup milk
Bread or cracker-crums
Prepare as directed and cut in even-sized slices. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dip in beaten egg and crums and fry in deep fat. When well browned on both sides, place them on a platter. Make a sauce with two tablespoons of the fat in which the sweetbreads were fried, the flour and milk and season with salt and pepper.
Fried sweetbreads are often served with green peas, placed in a mound or a little hill in the center of the platter. Macaroni may be boiled very tender and laid on the platter and the sweetbreads placed in the center, the pipes of the macaroni being laid about them in the form of a nest.
A straightforward crumb-and-fry treatment of veal sweetbreads, written for cooks who already knew the preliminary steps the book covers elsewhere. Most of the work is in that missing first stage.
- "Prepare as directed" is the whole jobThe standard preparation of the period: soak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water for an hour or two until they whiten, blanch them in acidulated water for a few minutes, plunge into cold water, then peel away the outer membrane and any tubes. They are then pressed flat between two plates under a weight and chilled before slicing, which is what makes even slices possible.
- What you are buyingSweetbreads are the thymus and pancreas of a young calf; the heart or stomach sweetbread is the plump, rounder one and is the better piece. Order from a butcher, use them within a day of purchase, and reject anything grey or strongly smelling. Two pairs is roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb.
- Deep fat temperatureThe original gives no temperature; a cook of the period judged the fat by eye or with a test crumb. Around 365F works. Blanched and pressed sweetbreads are largely cooked already, so the frying is chiefly to brown and crisp the crumb coat -- two to three minutes a side, and hot through before serving.
- CrumsSimply crumbs. Cracker crumbs give a coarser, saltier crust than bread crumbs; either works, but dry the slices and flour them lightly before the egg or the coating slides off in the fat.
- The egg is unmeasuredNo quantity is given. One large egg beaten with a tablespoon of water or milk will coat two pairs of sliced sweetbreads; use a second if you run short.
- The sauceThe two tablespoons of frying fat, two tablespoons of flour and one cup of milk is a plain white sauce. Cook the flour in the fat a minute before adding the milk, and strain if crumbs have fallen into the pan, as they will have.
- Macaroni "pipes"Long tubular macaroni, not the short elbows now sold under the name. "Boiled very tender" means well past al dente; cookbooks of the period commonly directed long boiling. Cook it as you prefer and coil it around the platter.
- YieldTwo pairs serve four as a main course, six as a first course.
Sweetbreads were a luxury item of the sort a well-run American household of the early twentieth century was expected to handle competently, and the Butterick book -- issued by the pattern and magazine company as part of its wide domestic-advice list -- treats them as ordinary butcher's stock rather than restaurant food. The French kitchen name, ris de veau, marks the same cut; the English word has no connection to sugar or bread, though its origin is uncertain -- one proposed explanation traces it to an older sense of "bread" meaning a piece or morsel of flesh, with "sweet" distinguishing it from the coarser offal. The serving suggestions here -- a mound of green peas, a nest of macaroni -- belong to a moment when platter arrangement was itself considered part of the recipe, and when the pale, mild flavor of sweetbreads was thought to want something green and something starchy alongside it.