Sweetbreads
HE treatment of sweetbreads when first received from the market is of the utmost importance and is always the same. Parboil in salted water for twenty minutes, never allowing them really to boil. Immerse in cold water in which has been poured a little vinegar or lemon juice. In an hour the sweetbreads will be perfectly firm and ready to be prepared in any of the following ways, first, however, removing the little strings and membranes which are easily detached after parboiling.
This is not a finished dish but the blanching step that every sweetbread recipe in the book depends on. Done properly it firms the gland and lets the membrane peel away; done at a rolling boil it makes the meat coarse and grainy.
- "Never allowing them really to boil"This is the hinge of the whole page. Hold the water at a bare shiver, with only the occasional bubble breaking; modern kitchens usually aim somewhere below a simmer. A true boil tightens and toughens the gland.
- What sweetbreads areThe thymus of a calf or lamb, and sometimes the pancreas ("stomach" or "heart" sweetbread). Veal thymus is the prize: pale, lobed, and mild. Order ahead from a butcher; supermarket meat counters rarely stock them.
- Soak firstThe book starts at the parboil, but modern practice is to soak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water, or lightly salted water, for two to three hours in the refrigerator until the water runs clear. This draws out blood and prevents a grey, mottled surface.
- The acidulated cold bathAbout a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice per quart of cold water is enough. Its job is to firm and whiten, not to flavour. Refrigerate during the hour the recipe allows rather than leaving the bowl on the counter.
- Press themThe original stops at "perfectly firm." Many later recipes direct that the drained sweetbreads be weighted between two plates in the refrigerator for an hour or more, which compacts the lobes so they can be sliced or split cleanly for braising, creaming or frying.
- Peeling the membraneWork while the sweetbreads are still damp and cool. The outer skin, tubes and connective strings lift off with fingertips and the tip of a paring knife; take the fat and any hard nodules with them, but do not tear into the lobes.
- Buy fresh and use fastOffal spoils faster than muscle meat. Sweetbreads should smell clean and look creamy pink-white, not yellow or slack. Blanch the day you buy them and cook within a day after that.
- QuantityThe recipe gives no amount. A pair of veal sweetbreads runs about 1 to 1 1/4 lb and serves two to three as a main course, four as a first course. They lose noticeable weight in trimming.
Sweetbreads were once a standard item of middle-class American cookery, and a book like this one could assume its readers bought them without comment. The name is old and unsettled: it is generally traced to the Old English brǣd meaning flesh rather than to anything baked, and the "sweet" is usually read as a contrast to the strong flavour of liver and kidney. Because the gland is soft, perishable and encased in membrane, cookbooks of the period tended to open their sweetbread sections with this kind of blanch-and-chill instruction and then treat it as settled, ahead of the creamed, larded and broiled variations that follow. Once common enough to appear on hotel lunch menus, sweetbreads are now a specialty purchase, which says more about how American butchery consolidated over the twentieth century than about any change in the meat itself.