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Preparing Sweetbreads
Sweetbreads should be plunged into cold water as soon as they are received, and soaked for one hour, then they should be parboiled in acidulated, salted water (one teaspoon salt and one tablespoon vinegar to one quart water) for twenty minutes. After draining they should be plunged into cold water again to make them firm. The little strings and membranes, which are easily detached after parboiling, should be removed.
This is a preparation method rather than a finished dish: everything from here on -- braising, breading and frying, creaming -- depends on getting the blanch and the peel right.
- Know which gland you haveButchers sell two kinds: the round, lobed "heart" sweetbread (the pancreas) and the longer, flatter throat sweetbread (the thymus). The heart sweetbread is the prized one and holds its shape better in the pan.
- Freshness is not optionalOffal spoils faster than muscle meat. Buy it the day you intend to cook it, keep it under 40F, and if it smells at all sour or looks grey rather than pale pink, discard it.
- The soak does real workThe hour in cold water draws out blood and leaves the sweetbread ivory rather than mottled. Change the water two or three times; if it is still pink, soak longer.
- Acidulated waterOne tablespoon vinegar to a quart is a mild bath -- lemon juice serves the same purpose. It firms the exterior and keeps the flesh white, and does not sour the flavour at this dilution.
- Twenty minutes is for large veal glandsA pair of full veal sweetbreads of a pound or more will take the full twenty minutes at a bare simmer. Lamb sweetbreads, which are much smaller, are done in three to five minutes; boiled the full twenty they turn dense and grainy. Never let the water gallop -- it breaks the lobes apart.
- Cold water, then weightThe plunge into cold water is what makes them firm enough to peel and slice. Many modern recipes go one step further: press the drained sweetbreads between two plates with a weight on top, refrigerated, for an hour. They slice cleanly and brown evenly afterwards.
- PeelingWork while they are cold and wet. Pull the outer membrane away with your fingers rather than a knife, and take out the tough connective threads between the lobes; anything left behind shrinks in the pan and buckles the meat.
- YieldOne pound of prepared sweetbreads serves two to three as a main course. Once blanched and peeled they keep, covered and chilled, for about a day.
Sweetbreads were standard middle-class fare: cheap, quickly cooked, and considered light enough for invalids and children, which is why household manuals of the period return to them so often. The name is old and its logic unrecorded -- "sweet" is generally taken to distinguish the mild flavour from stronger offal, and "bread" is often traced to an Old English word for a piece or morsel of flesh, though this is traditional etymology rather than settled fact. Neither gland has anything to do with bread or sugar: the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb both went to market under the same word, and cookbooks of the era distinguished them by a variety of names -- "heart" and "throat" sweetbreads, but also "neck" and "belly" or "stomach" sweetbread. Their fall from the everyday table came later, partly through cost and partly through squeamishness; a preparation once assumed to need no explanation now needs all of the above.