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How to Blanch Sweetbreads
Clean and neatly trim three pairs fine, heart sweetbreads. Soak them for two hours in cold water, changing the water three times. Remove from the water, drain well, and then plunge into boiling water with a teaspoon salt for five minutes. Remove, drain thoroughly, cover with a napkin, and they will be ready to use.
This is a preparation step rather than a finished dish: nearly every classic sweetbread recipe assumes the glands have already been soaked and blanched. Two details the original leaves out matter more than anything it includes.
- "Heart" sweetbreadsThe heart/throat distinction is a butcher's one: the rounded piece sold as heart or kernel sweetbread is the prized cut, while the elongated throat piece is stringier. Sources disagree on the underlying anatomy, the throat piece being the thymus and the heart or belly sweetbread often the pancreas. How they are sold, and what three pairs will weigh, varies with the animal and the butcher.
- Freshness is not optionalSweetbreads are among the most perishable of offal and spoil with a sour smell within a day or two. Buy them the day you intend to blanch them, keep them very cold, and reject any that are grey or slippery-slick rather than pale pink and firm.
- The soakingThe repeated changes of cold water draw out blood so the finished sweetbreads are ivory rather than mottled. Two hours in the refrigerator is the modern practice; a splash of milk or a little salt in the water is a common addition and does no harm.
- Blanch, then shockThe recipe stops at draining. Standard practice now is to drop the blanched sweetbreads straight into ice water, which halts the cooking and firms them enough to handle. Skipping this leaves them soft and difficult to trim cleanly.
- Peel and pressOnce cold, strip the outer membrane and any tubes or fat with your fingers and a paring knife; it comes away easily after blanching and will shrink and toughen if left on. Then lay the lobes between two plates with a weight on top and chill for an hour or more, which compacts them into slices that hold together when sautéd or breaded.
- Five minutes is a minimumFive minutes suits small lobes. Large veal sweetbreads want 8 to 12 minutes in barely simmering water, and a hard rolling boil at any size makes them spongy. Add a slice of lemon or a splash of vinegar to keep them white.
- They are not yet cookedBlanching only firms and cleans them. They still need their final cooking, whether braised, breaded and fried, or grilled.
- The napkinA clean cloth would keep the drained sweetbreads from drying out or discolouring. Plastic wrap or a covered dish in the refrigerator does the same job, and they should be used within a day of blanching.
- YieldThree pairs blanched and pressed will serve six generously as a main course, or eight to ten as an entrée course in the older sense.
Sweetbreads were a fixture of ambitious American and European cookery from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1930s, appearing creamed in patty shells, larded and braised with peas, or breaded as an entrée between fish and roast. The origin of the name is uncertain; one frequently repeated conjecture traces it to the Old English brord for flesh, with "sweet" distinguishing the mild-tasting glands from ordinary muscle meat. A book like this one carries the blanching instruction as a standalone entry because so many of its recipes depend on it, in the same way a cookbook of the era might explain once how to render suet or clarify stock. Their subsequent decline in Anglo-American home cooking had less to do with taste than with supply and squeamishness: the glands come only from young animals, spoil quickly, and require a butcher willing to order them.