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Broiled Sweetbreads
Soak in tepid water one-half hour; throw into hot water to harden and whiten; then draw off the outer casing, remove the little pipes and cut into thin slices, roll in beaten egg, then in cracker crumbs and broil. Or, drop them in hot fat or butter and fry.
A compressed set of instructions for a cut most cooks no longer meet. The sequence — soak, firm, peel, slice, crumb, broil — is still exactly how sweetbreads are handled in professional kitchens, but the original leaves out nearly every time and temperature.
- What you are buyingSweetbreads are the thymus (throat) and pancreas (heart or belly) glands of a young calf or lamb, not a gland of any sexual function. Heart sweetbreads are rounder, denser and easier to slice; throat sweetbreads are irregular and more likely to fall apart. Order them from a butcher; they are rarely stocked loose.
- The soak is the hingeHalf an hour in tepid water is the minimum. Several hours in cold water, changed two or three times until the water runs clear rather than pink, gives the pale colour the recipe is after. Refrigerate while soaking rather than leaving them at room temperature.
- "Throw into hot water to harden"This means blanching: bring them to a bare simmer in fresh water with a splash of lemon juice or vinegar, hold 3-5 minutes for lamb and 10-15 for veal, then plunge into ice water. The proteins set, and the membrane that follows will pull away cleanly.
- Peeling and the "little pipes"The outer casing peels off with your fingers while the sweetbreads are still damp. The pipes are veins and connective tubes running through the lobes; take out what comes away easily and leave the rest, or the whole thing disintegrates.
- Pressing, which the book omitsAfter blanching, lay them between two plates with a weight on top and chill for an hour or more. Pressed sweetbreads slice into even rounds that brown properly; unpressed ones tear and cook unevenly.
- Broiling in 1900 versus nowBroiling then versus now -- A broiler of the period would have been a hinged wire grid held over coals and turned by hand. Under a modern overhead broiler set high, put crumbed slices about four inches from the element, brush generously with melted butter, and give them roughly 3-4 minutes a side until the crumbs are deep gold. Dry crumbs under a broiler scorch before they colour, so the butter is not optional.
- Cracker crumbsPeriod cracker crumbs came from plain soda or water crackers, crushed fine. Unsalted saltines or plain dry breadcrumbs give the same result; seasoned commercial coating mixes do not.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity. A pound of sweetbreads is usually reckoned to serve three as a main course or four as a first course, with some loss of weight in trimming and blanching.
Sweetbreads were common eating in American and European households well into the twentieth century, and this recipe treats them plainly rather than as a delicacy. The name has nothing to do with bread or sugar; it is generally traced to older English usage in which "bread" meant a piece or morsel of flesh, with "sweet" distinguishing the mild-tasting gland from stronger organ meats such as liver and kidney. The soak-blanch-press-crumb method described here is close to that set down in French kitchen practice and carried into English-language cookbooks through the nineteenth century, and something very like it survives in restaurant kitchens today. Sweetbreads fell out of American home cooking in the second half of the twentieth century, along with most variety meats, as supermarket butchery narrowed to a handful of muscle cuts.