No. 1550

The Way to Prepare Sweetbreads

Maniere de Preparer Les Ris de Veau

Sweetbread is a glandulous substance found below the calf's throat and is considered a most delicate morsel. Separate the throat sweetbreads from the hearts; the throat part is the largest of the two, the heart is whiter, of a round shape and more delicate and tender than the throat, place them in cold water to disgorge for several hours changing it each hour so as to have them very white; lay them in a saucepan with an abundant supply of cold water, set it on the fire and when the sweetbreads are firm to the touch or poached, or more properly speaking parboiled, then refresh and suppress all the wind-pipes, fibers and fatty parts, afterward lay them under a very light weight. This blanching is for the purpose of hardening the sweetbreads so as to be able to lard them more easily. Blanched sweetbreads are used for sautéing by cutting them in two through their thickness. For brochettes they are cut in slices and for garnishing in the shape of salpicon.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a base preparation rather than a finished dish: everything else Ranhofer does with sweetbreads assumes they have been through this soak-blanch-press sequence. The hinge is the pressing, which sets the shape and firmness that later cooking depends on.

What the two sweetbreads areThe "throat" sweetbread is the thymus, a long, lobed, slightly coarser gland; the "heart" sweetbread is the pancreas, round and finer-grained. The heart sweetbread is the more commonly sold of the two, often labelled simply veal sweetbreads.
SourcingYou will need to order these from a butcher; they are rarely in supermarket cases. Buy them very fresh and pale, and use within a day, as offal glands spoil quickly.
DisgorgingSeveral hours in cold water with hourly changes is not fussiness; it draws out blood and keeps them white. Two to three hours in the refrigerator, water changed three or four times, does the job.
"Firm to the touch"Bring them up in plenty of cold water and let them barely simmer, not boil, for about 3 to 5 minutes for heart sweetbreads and up to 8 for large throat ones. Hard boiling swells and toughens them. "Refresh" means plunging them straight into ice water.
PeelingOnce cool, strip the outer membrane and pull away the tubes, gristle and fat while the sweetbread is still cold and firm. Warm sweetbreads tear.
The light weightLay them flat between two trays or plates with something like a 1 lb weight on top and refrigerate an hour or more. Too much weight squeezes out juices and compacts the texture; the point is a flat, even slab that will slice cleanly.
LardingThreading strips of pork fat through the meat with a larding needle is largely obsolete. For the sautéed and skewered preparations that follow, it can be skipped; the blanching and pressing are still worth doing.
Salpicon and brochetteA salpicon is a fine, even dice bound in sauce, used to fill vol-au-vents and croustades. Brochettes are skewers, so the slices need to be thick enough to hold — about half an inch.
YieldA pair of veal sweetbreads runs roughly 1 to 1.5 lb and loses weight in trimming; count on one pair for two to three people as a course.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) was Charles Ranhofer's summary of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its veal chapter reflects a kitchen where a single luxury organ could support a dozen numbered preparations. Sweetbreads were prized in nineteenth-century French cooking for exactly the reason Ranhofer gives: delicacy. The soak, blanch, trim and press routine described here is standard classical practice, repeated with little variation in Escoffier and in professional texts since; something close to it is still followed in restaurant kitchens today. What seems to have changed is availability: as American home cooks are often said to have retreated from offal through the twentieth century, sweetbreads moved from a staple of the fashionable menu to a special order, and the word "sweetbread" itself, whose origin is genuinely obscure, is now more likely to puzzle a diner than to tempt one.