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Sweetbread in White Sauce
Put a sweetbread in a bowl and cover it with cold water, and let it steep for an hour or two. Drain the sweetbread, put it into a saucepan with sufficient cold water to cover, and stand it over the fire. When the water boils move the saucepan a little off the fire so that the sweetbread may cook slowly for about thirty minutes. At the end of that time plunge the sweetbread into a basin of cold water, then drain it, trim off the fat, and cut it into small pieces. Put one-third of a tablespoonful of arrowroot into a basin, and mix it smoothly with one breakfast cupful of milk; turn it into the saucepan, stir over the fire until it boils, then put in the sweetbread, and season to taste with pepper and salt, and simmer it gently at the edge of the fire for ten minutes. At the end of that time turn the sweetbread and sauce onto a hot dish, garnish with croutons of fried bread that have been fried brown in butter, or sippets of toast, and serve.
A plain nursery-and-invalid style preparation that depends entirely on how the sweetbread is handled before it ever meets the sauce. The soaking and blanching are not optional steps.
- The hinge: soak, then blanch, then chillThe long cold soak draws out blood, and the plunge into cold water after poaching firms the gland so the membrane and fat can be pulled away cleanly. Skip either and the finished dish is grey, soft and faintly livery.
- Which sweetbreadButchers today sell veal thymus ("throat") and pancreas ("heart" or "stomach" sweetbread); the round heart sweetbread is usually reckoned the better one. One pair weighs roughly 3/4 to 1 lb, which would serve about two here.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is about 8 to 10 fl oz. Use 1 cup of milk and expect a thin, pourable sauce rather than a coating one.
- ArrowrootOne-third tablespoon of arrowroot to a cup of milk gives barely more than a nap. Arrowroot sets clear and glossy but thins if held hot or boiled hard, so mix it cold with a little of the milk, add the rest, and bring it just to the boil once.
- "At the edge of the fire"On a range this meant the cooler outer ring: a bare shiver, not a simmer. On a modern burner use the lowest setting, and be aware that ten minutes at a real simmer will both toughen the sweetbread and break down the arrowroot.
- Poaching timeThirty minutes below the boil suits a large veal thymus. Smaller lamb sweetbreads are done in 8 to 10 minutes and will go woolly if given the full half hour.
- SeasoningPepper and salt alone leave this very flat. A grating of nutmeg, a squeeze of lemon, or a spoonful of the poaching liquid in place of some of the milk lifts it.
- SippetsSippets are small triangles or fingers of toast, cut after toasting. They and the fried croutons are structural here, not decoration; the dish is soft throughout and needs them.
Sweetbreads were a luxury item on American hotel menus through the late nineteenth century, served larded and braised, glazed, in patty shells, with peas or truffles. This version is not one of those: white sauce, arrowroot rather than flour, no wine, no stock, no browning. That combination is the vocabulary of Victorian invalid cookery, the light, pale, easily digested food prescribed for convalescents, and arrowroot in particular was regarded as a gentle thickener for a delicate stomach. Books of this era often carried such dishes alongside the banquet fare, since a large house or hotel was expected to feed the sick as well as the celebrating. The gland itself is the thymus or pancreas of a young calf or lamb; the name is generally traced to "sweet" for its mild richness and the older sense of "bread" as a morsel of flesh, though the etymology has never been settled.