Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Sweet Breads
Scald in salt and water, take out the stringy parts; then put in cold water a few minutes; dry in a towel; dip in an egg and bread crumbs, and fry brown in butter; when done place on a hot dish: pour into the pan a cup of sweet cream, a little pepper and salt, and a little parsley chopped fine ; add flour, and when boiling pour over the sweet breads; add mushrooms, if desired.
A short, confident nineteenth-century treatment: blanch, crumb, fry, then build a quick cream pan sauce. Most of the work is in the preparation the recipe passes over in a few words.
- What sweetbreads areSweetbreads are the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb, not brain or spinal tissue. The warning attached to this page does not describe thymus, which is sold routinely by butchers today. Veal sweetbreads are the ones worth buying, in two forms: the round, firm heart or belly sweetbread and the looser throat or neck sweetbread.
- The step that mattersSoak them first. Two to three hours in several changes of cold water, or overnight in the refrigerator, draws out blood and is the difference between clean-tasting sweetbreads and metallic ones. Only then do you scald as directed.
- "Scald in salt and water"This means a brief poach, not a boil: bring salted water barely to a simmer, hold the sweetbreads in it three to five minutes until the surface firms, then straight into the cold water the recipe calls for. Firming is what lets you peel away the outer membrane and the "stringy parts" cleanly.
- PressingAfter the cold water and before crumbing, sweetbreads are commonly pressed flat between two plates with a weight on top for an hour in the refrigerator. The book omits it, but it gives even thickness and even browning.
- Frying in butterWhole butter over the heat needed to brown crumbs will scorch. Use clarified butter, or butter cut with a neutral oil, over medium heat, five to six minutes a side for pieces about half an inch thick.
- "Sweet cream"Cream that has not soured, i.e. ordinary heavy or whipping cream. A cup here means a half-pint measure, roughly 8 fl oz.
- "Add flour"No quantity is given and the order is loose. In practice, whisk a teaspoon or two of flour into a little of the cream to make a slurry, or work it into a knob of butter, and stir that into the pan; the sauce should coat a spoon after a minute at a simmer. Adding dry flour to boiling cream will give you lumps.
- MushroomsSauté them separately in the same pan before the cream goes in, so they release and reabsorb their liquid rather than watering down the sauce.
- YieldVeal sweetbreads vary, but roughly a pound of trimmed sweetbread serves three or four as a first course, two as a main.
The name has nothing to do with sugar or baking: "bread" is generally traced to the Old English brǣd, meaning flesh or roast meat, with "sweet" distinguishing the mild, milky taste of the gland from the strong flavour of liver or kidney. Sweetbreads were prized in nineteenth-century cookery precisely because they were delicate and troublesome — they spoil quickly, must be soaked and trimmed by hand, and were therefore a mark of a kitchen with time and skill in it. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada" and sold in aid of the Hospital for Sick Children, was one of the first Canadian charity cookbooks.