Home › The World's Kitchen › Sweetbreads Au Gratin
Sweetbreads Au Gratin
Blanch and trim six sweethreads, then cut crosswise into quarter-inch pieces. Heat one tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, add the sweetbreads and briskly fry for two minutes on each side. Remove and keep on a plate until required. Finely chop six ounces raw, lean, veal, place in a mortar and pound to a fine pulp, then add three egg yolks, thoroughly pound again and rub through a wire sieve into a bowl. Season with a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg, then gradually pour in one and a half gills cream, sharply mixing while adding it. Place three-quarters of the force in a pastry bag, then press in around baking dish to crown-shape forms one inch high, arrange sweetbread pieces on top, one overlapping another and season with two saltspoons salt and one saltspoon pepper. Spread balance of force over sweetbreads, pour a light gill sherry around and in the centre of the crown. Set in moderate oven to bake for twenty-five minutes, frequently basting with the sherry meanwhile. Pour two gills demi-glace in a saucepan, let reduce to half the quantity, then pour over the breads and reset in the oven for five minutes longer. Remove, baste with the sauce and serve.
A Belle Époque restaurant dish: veal quenelle forcemeat piped into a crown, filled with sautéed sweetbreads, baked and finished with reduced demi-glace. Everything hinges on the forcemeat, which must stay cold or it will break in the oven.
- Keep the force coldThe veal, egg yolks and cream form an emulsion that splits if it warms. Chill the veal, the mortar or processor bowl and the cream, work quickly, and refrigerate the piped crown while the oven heats. A broken force weeps liquid and collapses instead of setting.
- Preparing the sweetbreads"Blanch and trim" assumes the full classical routine: soak in several changes of cold water for 3-4 hours until they whiten, simmer 5 minutes, plunge into ice water, then peel off the outer membrane and any fat or tubes. Press flat between two plates under a weight for an hour before slicing, or the quarter-inch pieces will fall apart.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is 1/2 cup, so one and a half gills of cream is 3/4 cup and two gills of demi-glace is 1 cup, reduced to 1/2. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon. "A light gill" of sherry means a scant 1/2 cup.
- The cayenneTwo saltspoons is a full 1/2 teaspoon of cayenne in about a pound of forcemeat, which is aggressive by current palates and will dominate the veal. A generous pinch, or a scant 1/4 teaspoon, sits closer to what most cooks now want.
- Moderate oven350F. The forcemeat is a custard bound with yolk and cream; hotter than this and it curdles at the edges before the centre sets.
- Demi-glaceProperly a brown veal stock reduced with espagnole sauce, sold frozen or as concentrate today. A cup of good unsalted veal or beef stock reduced by half works in its place, but taste before salting, since concentrates are already seasoned.
- BastingThe sherry poured around and into the centre is there to be spooned back over the sweetbreads. Open the oven every 6-8 minutes rather than "frequently" — the top of the force should glaze, not dry out.
- YieldServes six as a first course, four as a main. It is a mould as much as a dish: use a shallow gratin dish or a wide sauté pan the crown can be piped into with a plain half-inch tube, and serve straight from it.
Sweetbreads — the thymus and pancreas of a calf — were among the most prized items on a nineteenth-century menu, expensive enough that hotel kitchens built elaborate garnishes around them, and this recipe is pure grand-restaurant construction: a piped ring of *farce de veau*, essentially quenelle mixture, used as an edible mould. The name has nothing to do with bread or sugar; "sweet" is generally taken to distinguish the mild flavour from muscle meat, and "bread" is usually traced to an Old English word for flesh or morsel. The book's "World's Kitchen" section reflects the era when American hotel and club cooking took its vocabulary wholesale from French professional practice — demi-glace, gills, saltspoons, forcemeat rubbed through a wire sieve by hand. Offal of this kind vanished from home cooking in the English-speaking world after the mid-twentieth century, and sweetbreads are now a butcher's special order rather than a staple, which makes recipes like this read as far more exotic than they were when written.