Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Baked Lambs' Sweetbreads
Baked Lambs' Sweetbreads
Clean the sweetbreads, washing them in plenty of water, then steep them in water for an hour or more. Drain the sweetbreads and blanch them in boiling water until firm, then boil them slowly for fifteen to twenty minutes; drain and wipe the sweet-breads on a cloth; roll them in the beaten yolks of eggs, and then put in plenty of grated breadcrumbs, and place them in a quick oven until nicely browned. Boil one wineglassful of sherry wine with one-half pint of gravy, arrange the sweetbreads in a group on a hot dish, pour the gravy over them, and serve at once.
A straightforward breaded-and-baked treatment that depends almost entirely on the preliminary soaking and blanching. Everything else is assembly.
- The hinge: soak, then blanch, then pressThe long cold soak draws out blood and helps keep the finished sweetbreads pale rather than grey. After blanching and draining it is worth laying them on a tray under a second tray with a light weight for 30 minutes; they firm up, hold their shape and take the crumb coating better.
- Cooking timeFifteen to twenty minutes of simmering is generous for lambs' sweetbreads, which are small. Six to eight minutes at a bare simmer after the blanch is enough to firm them through; longer and they tighten and turn woolly, and they still have oven time ahead.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400-450F. The sweetbreads are already cooked, so the oven is only setting and colouring the crumb — 10 to 15 minutes, or until the coating is evenly bronzed.
- WineglassfulIn American cookbooks of this period a wineglass is about 2 fl oz (a quarter cup). Reduce the sherry with the gravy rather than simply combining them, or the sauce tastes raw and thin.
- "Gravy"Probably not pan drippings thickened with flour; in a hotel kitchen of this kind it most likely means a brown sauce or reduced stock from the stockpot. A half pint is one cup; a good veal or beef stock reduced and lightly thickened stands in.
- SourcingSweetbreads are the thymus (throat) and pancreas (heart) glands. Order ahead from a butcher; the heart sweetbread is rounder, meatier and easier to bread neatly. Buy them very fresh and use within a day, as they spoil quickly.
- CrumbingEgg yolk alone is a stiff coating. Loosen the beaten yolks with a spoonful of water or cream so they flow, and use dry fine crumbs. A film of melted butter over the crumbed sweetbreads before they go in helps them brown without frying.
- YieldAllow one pair of lambs' sweetbreads per person; they are small and weights vary a good deal, so buy by the pair rather than by weight.
Sweetbreads were a luxury item on American hotel menus around 1900, and Oscar Tschirky's book — assembled from the Waldorf's own service — treats them as routine, with a run of preparations braised, larded, broiled and, here, breaded and baked. The origin of the English name is obscure; one common suggestion connects "bread" to an older sense meaning a morsel of roast meat, with "sweet" distinguishing the mild glands from stronger offal, but this is not settled. Lambs' sweetbreads were the smaller, more delicate alternative to calves', and the whole sequence — soak, blanch, press, crumb, brown, sauce with sherry and brown gravy — follows classical French practice as it was carried into American hotel kitchens by chefs trained in that system. That such variety meats have since become specialty-butcher items says more about the industrialisation of meatpacking than about any change in taste.