No. 1571

Sweetbreads, English Style

Ris de Veau a l'Anglaise

Blanch six medium size unlarded sweetbreads; lay them in a sautoir garnished with slices of fat pork, minced carrots and onions, thyme, bay leaf and whole peppers; moisten to three-quarters of their height with beef stock (No. 194a), and after it comes to a boil finish cooking in a moderate oven, when done, remove and put them under a press in oval tin rings; when cold unmold them and cut them crosswise through the center. Cover one side of each sweetbread with cooked fine herbs (No. 385), laying it on a quarter of an inch thick; set the other half belonging to it on top and remove all the superfluous preparation oozing from the sides. Beat up well one-quarter of a pound of melted butter with six egg-yolks, dip the sweetbreads into this, then roll them in freshly grated bread-crumbs; bread-crumb them twice before laying them on a baking tin, pour a little butter over and cook them in a moderate oven; serve a brown English sauce separately.

Brown English Sauce.—Reduce espagnole sauce (N. 414) with meat-glaze (No. 402) adding just before serving some Worcestershire sauce, butter, lemon juice and fine herbs.

← No. 1570 Sweetbreads au Monarch Veal No. 1572 Sweetbread Fritters, Cream Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a brigade, a stock pot and a numbered sauce repertoire. Stripped of the cross-references, this is a braise, a press, a stuffed sandwich of sweetbread halves, and a double breading.

The hinge: press them coldSweetbreads are loose and slippery hot, and will not slice cleanly or hold a filling. Weighting them until completely cold — several hours, overnight is better — is what makes the split-and-fill step possible. Skip it and the assembly falls apart in the crumbs.
Buying and prepping"Six medium size" tells you nothing about which gland; either throat (thymus) or heart (pancreas) sweetbreads will work, roughly 4-6 oz each, ordered from a butcher. Plan on a few hours of soaking in cold water, changed often, before the blanch; blanch briefly in salted water, then straight into ice water so the membrane can be peeled.
Sautoir and fat porkA sautoir is a straight-sided shallow pan with a lid — a modern sauté pan or small braiser. "Slices of fat pork" is unsmoked fatback or blanched salt pork, laid on the bottom as a barding layer; blanch salt pork first or the braise turns saline as the stock reduces.
Oven numbers"Moderate" is conventionally read as somewhere around 325-350F; Ranhofer gives no figure. Reckon on roughly 35-45 minutes for the braise, covered, until a skewer meets no resistance, and 15-20 minutes for the final baking of the breaded sweetbreads, until the crumbs are set and gold.
Cooked fine herbs (No. 385)Ranhofer's cooked fines herbes is a cooked mince along the lines of shallot and mushroom sweated in butter, moistened, reduced dry and finished with parsley. A stiff mushroom duxelles is the nearest equivalent, and stiff is the point: anything wet will squeeze out at the seams.
The egg-yolk butter dipQuarter pound of melted butter beaten with six yolks is a warm emulsion, and it will scramble if the butter is hot. Let it cool to just barely liquid, whisk it in gradually, and use it at room temperature. If it breaks, the crumbs will not adhere evenly.
Breading twiceDip, crumb, dip again, crumb again. The doubled coat is structural here — it seals the herb filling inside the reassembled halves. Fresh crumbs from a day-old loaf, not dried packaged crumbs, which brown too fast and taste of nothing.
The sauce, without the cross-referencesEspagnole reduced with meat glaze is essentially a brown veal sauce concentrated hard. A good reduced veal or beef demi-glace stands in; off the heat, finish it with Worcestershire, a knob of butter, lemon juice and chopped herbs to taste. Add the Worcestershire last, as written, or its vinegar bite cooks flat.
YieldSix stuffed sweetbreads serve six as a first course, or three to four as a main with a vegetable.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as an encyclopedia of the restaurant's kitchen, and its veal section carries a long run of sweetbread preparations — a measure of how central offal was to fine dining before American tastes narrowed to muscle cuts. "À l'Anglaise" in French professional cooking generally signals plain treatment, and often the flour-egg-crumb coating followed by frying or baking (here the coating is a butter-and-yolk dip rather than flour and egg); the English claim is doubled by the Worcestershire sauce in the accompaniment, a bottled condiment that had become a familiar shorthand for English flavour. Braising, pressing cold, then splitting and filling gives neat uniform shapes that plate well, and the oval tin rings Ranhofer calls for suggest the equipment of a large professional kitchen.