No. 1563

Sweetbreads, Piedmontese Style

Ris de Veau a la Piemontaise

Lay the sweetbreads to cool under a weight or in the press (Fig. 71) after they are blanched; then cut them across through their thickness into slices, season and range these in a sautoir with melted butter, cook them nicely and moisten with white wine; reduce and add a little veloute sauce (No. 415). A few minutes later put in some white Piedmontese truffles, half an ounce for each sweetbread. Dress this inside a border of Piedmontese risot (No. 739).

← No. 1562 Sweetbreads, Neapolitan Style Veal No. 1564 Sweetbreads, Portuguese Style →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you have already soaked, blanched and pressed the sweetbreads, and that a pot of velouté is standing by. The whole dish is about twenty minutes once that groundwork is done.

The blanching he skipsBefore any of this, sweetbreads are soaked in several changes of cold water for a few hours to purge blood, then brought slowly to a bare simmer in salted water for 3-5 minutes, refreshed in ice water, and peeled of membrane and gristle. Only then do they go under the weight.
Under a weightRanhofer's Fig. 71 is a purpose-made press for meats; a sheet pan set on the sweetbreads with a few cans on top does the same job. Chill them pressed for at least an hour so they firm up enough to slice cleanly across the thickness.
SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan wide enough to hold the slices in one layer. Crowding steams them and you lose the browning that this otherwise pale dish depends on.
Cook them nicelyMedium heat, butter, a few minutes per side to a light gold. The brief blanch has firmed the sweetbreads rather than cooked them through, and they finish in the wine and velueté; pushed hard in the pan they tighten and go grainy.
VeloutéRanhofer's No. 415 is a white stock thickened with roux. A few spoonfuls of any good veal or chicken velouté works; in its absence, reduce the wine with strong veal stock and mount with cold butter.
White Piedmontese trufflesThese are Tuber magnatum, the Alba white truffle, in season roughly October to December and priced accordingly. Half an ounce per sweetbread is about 14 g, a serious quantity today. Ranhofer adds them to the pan a few minutes before dressing; modern practice generally shaves them over the finished dish off the heat, since much of the aroma is lost to heat.
Piedmontese risottoHis No. 739 is the risotto cross-referenced here. Any firm risotto piped or spooned into a ring on the platter will serve as the border.
YieldOne veal sweetbread serves one to two as a course. For four, count on three good sweetbreads, about 1 1/2 lb before trimming.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the house repertory written out at length, some 3,500 numbered recipes cross-referenced to one another like a manual. The run of sweetbread recipes here — Neapolitan, Piedmontese, Portuguese, one after another — shows how a nineteenth-century grand kitchen organised itself: a single well-understood cut, then a set of regional garnishes bolted on, each with its own sauce and border. "Piemontaise" in that system meant two things reliably, white truffles and a buttered rice, both genuine markers of Piedmont, where the Alba truffle trade and the rice paddies of the Po valley sit within a few dozen miles of each other. Sweetbreads themselves were a luxury item of the period rather than the offal curiosity they became later, and Delmonico's customers would have expected to see them on a menu that also carried canvasback duck and terrapin.