Home › The World's Kitchen › Sweetbreads, Bercy
Sweetbreads, Bercy
Soak six heart sweetbreads in plenty of fresh water for two hours; drain. Then plunge the sweetbreads in two quarts of boiling water with a teaspoon of salt for five minutes. Drain, then place in cold water for five minutes; drain well again. Lard their surfaces with six thin strips of larding pork. Finely slice half a carrot, half an onion, two branches of parsley, one branch of celery and one leek. Place all the vegetables at the bottom of a frying pan, adding all the skin and parings of the piece of pork cut out for the larding strips. Arrange the sweetbreads over the vegetables. Season with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper; add a tablespoon melted butter to the pan, place on the fire for six minutes; moisten with one gill white broth, one gill white wine and one gill of demi-glace. Cover the breads with a piece of buttered paper, then set in the oven for thirty minutes. Remove, lift them up, lay over six small, round toasts and keep warm. Place in a small saucepan one small, finely chopped onion with a level tablespoon butter and fry for five minutes. Strain the sweetbreads gravy into this, skim the fat from the surface and add half teaspoon freshly chopped chives; reduce the sauce on the fire to one gill and take off the fire. Squeeze in the juice of one-quarter lemon, add half ounce butter, little by little, pour sauce over sweetbreads and serve.
A classic French braise that assumes a professional larder: veal stock, demi-glace, larding pork and a larding needle. Most of the work is in the preparation of the sweetbreads themselves, and the recipe glosses over one step modern cooks should not skip.
- Peel after blanchingThe soak, blanch and cold-water shock are there to firm the glands so the outer membrane and any tubes can be pulled away. Do that peeling while they are cold and damp, then press them flat between two plates under a weight for an hour before larding, or they will braise into an uneven shape.
- "Heart" sweetbreadsThe heart sweetbread is the rounded, plumper gland, firmer and more prized than the elongated throat sweetbread; sources differ as to whether it is properly the pancreas or the lower lobe of the thymus lying near the heart. Six is a large order, so a butcher may need notice, and veal sweetbreads should be used within a day of purchase or frozen.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. The braising liquid is therefore 1/2 cup each of white broth, white wine and demi-glace, and the finished sauce is reduced back to 1/2 cup.
- White broth and demi-glace"White broth" is unroasted veal or chicken stock, pale and lightly gelatinous. Demi-glace is reduced brown veal stock; a good commercial concentrate loosened with water is the practical substitute, but use it sparingly since most are far saltier than a kitchen-made one.
- Larding porkUnsmoked fatback or lean salt pork cut into thin lardons and drawn through the meat with a larding needle. If you have no needle, drape thin sheets of fatback over the sweetbreads instead; the parings and skin still go under them in the pan as directed.
- Oven heatNone is given. A moderate oven, 325-350F, is right for a covered braise of this size; the liquid should barely tremble for the thirty minutes.
- The buttered paperA cartouche of parchment cut to the pan and buttered on the underside. It keeps the exposed tops from drying and colouring while allowing a little reduction, which a tight lid will not do.
- Bercy sauceSweat the onion in butter without browning it, strain the braising liquid over, degrease thoroughly, then reduce. The final half ounce of butter goes in off the heat, a piece at a time, swirling; if the sauce boils after that it will separate.
- YieldSix sweetbreads on six toasts serves six as a course, or three generously as a main dish.
Bercy was the wine quarter of Paris, a stretch of riverside warehouses on the Right Bank where barrels were unloaded and stored before entering the city; the name is traditionally attached in nineteenth-century restaurant cooking to preparations built on shallots reduced in white wine and finished with butter, which is close to the sauce here, allowing that the author reaches for an onion and chives instead of shallot and parsley. The dish belongs to the era when veal sweetbreads were a staple of the fashionable menu rather than an oddity, braised pale in a bed of aromatics on buttered toast so the bread caught the sauce.