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Fried Sweetbreads
Parboil and cut in even-sized pieces; sprinkle with salt and pepper, dip them first in beaten egg and then in bread or cracker crumbs, and fry in hot lard. When well browned on both sides, place them on a platter. Turn out part of the fat in which they were fried, leaving in the pan only one tablespoonful. Stir into this hot fat one tablespoon of flour, and stir well until frothy; then set the pan back a little and gradually add one cup of milk, stirring all the time. Season with salt and pepper, and cook about two minutes. Strain and pour over the sweetbreads. Fried sweetbreads are served in many ways. They are often dished with green peas, cooked rather dry and placed in a mound or little hill in the center of the platter, the sweetbreads being laid around. 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 like a little nest.
Stir
The recipe assumes you already know how to handle sweetbreads, which no longer goes without saying. Everything hinges on the preparation the first three words gloss over.
- The parboil is four steps, not oneSoak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water for a few hours until they whiten, then bring them slowly to a bare simmer in salted water with a splash of vinegar or lemon for 15 to 20 minutes. Plunge them into ice water, peel away the membrane and any tubes, then press between two plates under a weight for an hour or more. Unpressed sweetbreads are loose and will not slice into the "even-sized pieces" the recipe calls for.
- Which glandButchers sell two kinds: the throat or neck sweetbread (thymus, elongated) and the round, firmer heart or stomach sweetbread (pancreas). The round ones were traditionally reckoned the prize and hold their shape best for frying. Veal is the standard; lamb sweetbreads are smaller and cook faster.
- Buy them fresh and use them fastSweetbreads are among the most perishable of offal. Cook them the day you buy them, or at the very least start the soaking immediately. Frozen ones give up more water and brown poorly.
- The fatLard is still ideal here and gives the cleanest browning, but any neutral fat at a moderate frying heat, roughly 350-375F, works. "Hot" means hot enough that the crumb sets on contact; cooler fat leaves the coating greasy and pale. Two to three minutes a side is enough, since the parboiling has already done most of the cooking.
- The sauce is a pan béchamelOne tablespoon fat, one tablespoon flour, one cup milk makes a thin gravy. "Stir until frothy" means cook the roux until it bubbles and loses its raw smell, roughly a minute. "Set the pan back a little" is a range-top instruction: move it off direct heat before adding the milk so it does not seize.
- StrainingWorth doing. The pan will hold scorched crumb from the frying, and straining is the difference between a smooth white sauce and one flecked brown.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity; the single cup of milk suggests a modest dish, perhaps two pairs of veal sweetbreads for four. The peas or macaroni garnish may also have served to stretch a costly ingredient.
- The truncated lineThe text ends mid-word with "Stir", apparently an artifact of the original page. The method as printed reads as complete, though whether anything followed cannot be confirmed from this page.
Sweetbreads were a luxury item in American households of the 1890s and 1900s, priced well above ordinary cuts and treated as company food, which is why the Butterick book bothers to list three ways of dishing them up. The name's origin is uncertain: it has no clear connection to bread or to sweetness, and one common explanation traces the second element to Old English bræd, meaning flesh, with "sweet" distinguishing the mild-flavored glands from strong-tasting organ meats like liver and kidney -- though this remains a proposed derivation rather than a settled one. The technique here -- parboil, crumb, fry, then build a quick milk gravy in the same pan -- is a standard nineteenth-century treatment for delicate pre-cooked meat, and the peas-in-a-mound and macaroni-nest presentations reflect a period fondness for arranging food architecturally on the platter. Butterick, a pattern company, published its cook book as part of a broader library of domestic manuals aimed at the middle-class housewife managing a kitchen without a professional cook, and the assumption that she would know how to parboil and press a sweetbread tells you something about what was expected of her.