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CREAMED SWEETBREADS (Take one pair of sweetbreads)
Take one pair of sweetbreads; one tablespoon of butter; one tablespoon of flour; one cup of cream; one tablespoon of parsley; salt and pepper. Parboil the sweetbreads and when they are cold enough to handle, remove all the membrane and break them into small pieces. Melt the butter, add the flour, mix until smooth, and then add the cream, and stir until the preparation thickens, placing the whole in a graniteware pan set in another containing boiling water. When the liquid has thickened add the sweetbreads, and as soon as they are heated, season with salt, pepper and the chopped parsley.
A plain white sauce built around sweetbreads, with the whole of the technique hidden in the two words "parboil the sweetbreads." Get that stage right and the rest is a five-minute béchamel.
- What you are buyingSweetbreads are the thymus (the throat sweetbread) and sometimes the pancreas (the heart or stomach sweetbread) of a calf or lamb. A "pair" means one animal's worth, roughly 3/4 to 1 lb. Most supermarkets do not carry them; order from a butcher, and use them within a day or two of purchase.
- Soak before you parboilThe step the recipe assumes rather than states. Soak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water for two to three hours, until the water stays clear, to draw out blood. Otherwise the finished sauce goes grey and tastes faintly of iron.
- The parboil itselfSimmer in salted water with a splash of lemon juice or vinegar — a few minutes will firm them enough for peeling, longer (up to 15 or 20 minutes) if you want them cooked through — then transfer straight into ice water. Firming makes the membrane come away in sheets rather than shreds. Peel while still damp; a dry sweetbread clings to its skin.
- Press themA classical further step the recipe does not mention: the cooled sweetbreads are laid flat between two plates under a weight for an hour, which gives the even texture that lets them break into tidy pieces instead of crumbling.
- "One cup of cream"Cream sold around 1900 was generally thinner than modern heavy cream, often nearer today's light cream or half-and-half, though farm and dairy cream varied a good deal. A cup of modern heavy cream will give a richer, heavier result than intended; thin it with milk or stock, or use light cream.
- Graniteware and the water bathGraniteware is enamel over steel — specified because it was non-reactive, unlike the tinned copper and iron of the period. Any modern saucepan does. The pan-within-a-pan is a double boiler, used here so the cream cannot catch or break once the sweetbreads go in.
- Reheating, not recookingThe sweetbreads are already cooked. Fold them in and hold just until hot through, two or three minutes — longer and the delicate texture that justifies the whole exercise turns woolly.
- Yield and servingServes two as a main course, three or four as a first course. The period presentation is on toast points, in puff-pastry patty shells, or spooned over rice; a grating of nutmeg or a spoonful of sherry stirred in at the end is well within the idiom.
Sweetbreads sat near the top of the late-Victorian and Edwardian table — expensive, quick to spoil, and prized for a texture unlike anything else in the butcher's shop. They turn up constantly in menus of the 1890s and 1900s as an entrée between the fish and the roast, and in convalescent cookery, where soft, mild, richly sauced dishes were thought suitable for invalids. That this one is filed under Sauces rather than Meats says something about how the Butterick book organized itself: the cream sauce is the transferable lesson, and the sweetbreads are one of the things a cook might set into it. The specification of a graniteware pan is a small period marker in itself, since enamelled steel was the affordable, non-reactive newcomer in American kitchens in these decades. American appetite for sweetbreads declined sharply through the second half of the twentieth century, and they are now a special-order item rather than a weeknight one.