Home › The World's Kitchen › Escalopes of Sweetbreads, Villeroi
Escalopes of Sweetbreads, Villeroi
Soak six heart sweetbreads in cold water two hours, remove and plunge them in boiling water five minutes, lift them up, and neatly trim all around; cut them crosswise in pieces a quarter inch thick. Season with half teaspoon salt and quarter teaspoon of pepper.
Prepare Villeroi sauce, then dip each piece in the sauce; lay the pieces on a lightly buttered tin and let cool off. Plunge them once more in the sauce, and let cool off again, lightly roll them in flour, then lightly dip them in beaten egg; roll in bread crumbs. Arrange them in a frying basket and fry in hot, but not boiling, fat ten minutes. Take up, drain thoroughly, sprinkle a little salt over them, dress on a dish with a folded napkin, decorate with a little parsley greens and send to the table with one gill hot tomato sauce separately.
A classic à la Villeroi preparation: cooked sweetbreads sealed in a chilled coating sauce, then breaded and fried. The recipe assumes you already know how to make Villeroi sauce and how long deep fat can be trusted.
- The hinge: the sauce must set hardVilleroi is a velouté or allemande reduced until it coats a spoon heavily and thickens to near-paste when cold. If it is thin, the double dipping and chilling will not build a shell, and the sauce will bleed out into the fat during frying. Chill each coat until firm to the touch, ideally in the refrigerator rather than merely on the counter.
- "Heart sweetbreads"Old butchery distinguished the elongated "throat" sweetbread (the thymus) from the rounder, plumper gland lying nearer the heart -- the "heart" or "belly" sweetbread, usually the pancreas -- which was reckoned the choice piece. Most sellers today simply offer veal sweetbreads; order ahead and ask for the rounder heart lobes if the butcher makes the distinction.
- Soaking and trimmingSoak in several changes of cold water, refrigerated, to draw out blood. After the five-minute blanch, refresh in cold water so you can peel away the membrane and connective tissue cleanly, then press the glands flat under a weighted plate for an hour before slicing to get even quarter-inch escalopes.
- "Hot but not boiling fat"Fat smokes and breaks down long before it visibly boils, so the phrase is best read as hot but short of smoking. In modern terms that is somewhere around 350-360F, hot enough to set the crumbs at once without scorching them before the coating heats through.
- Ten minutes is far too longThe sweetbreads are already cooked and the slices are only a quarter inch thick. At 350F the crumb crust will be deep gold in three to four minutes, and the Villeroi inside will be molten. Ten minutes gives a dark, bitter crust and a coating that has begun to leak.
- A gillHalf a cup of tomato sauce, served hot in a sauceboat alongside.
- The folded napkinFried items were dressed on a napkin folded on the platter to absorb draining fat. A wire rack does the job better; if you want the period look, drain first, then transfer to the napkin at the last moment.
- YieldSix sweetbreads sliced crosswise gives roughly thirty to thirty-six escalopes, serving six as a first course or four generously.
The name is traditionally associated with the Villeroy family of French marshals and courtiers, and is usually said to come from a ducal household rather than from any documented cook, though the attribution is not documented. In professional practice à la Villeroi describes a method more than a sauce: an already-cooked item is masked in a very reduced velouté, chilled until the coating is solid, then breadcrumbed and deep-fried, so that cutting into it releases a hot sauce from inside the crust. Sweetbreads, chicken, and brains were the usual candidates.