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Sweetbreads Braise, Cocotte
Blanche and braise six sweetbreads. With a small vegetable scoop dig out all you can from two medium-sized carrots and two medium-sized turnips. Place them in a saucepan with two gills water, one tablespoon butter, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Set on the fire and let boil for two minutes, then place the pan in the oven for thirty minutes. Remove it from the oven, add three tablespoons cooked green peas to the pan, gently mix with a spoon and heat for two minutes longer.
Arrange the sweetbreads crown shape in an earthen cocotte dish. Drain the cooked vegetables and place them in the centre of the sweet-breads; strain the sweetbread sauce through a Chinese strainer and pour it around the breads. Then thoroughly heat on the range and serve in the cocottiere.
The recipe assumes you already know how to blanch and braise sweetbreads, and it gives no oven temperature. Both gaps are worth filling before you start.
- Sweetbreads firstVeal sweetbreads (usually the thymus, sometimes the pancreas) need ordering from a butcher, usually a day ahead. Soak them in several changes of cold water for two to three hours until they pale, blanch 3-5 minutes in acidulated water, cool, then peel off the membrane and press between two plates under a weight before braising in stock with aromatics, 30-40 minutes at a bare simmer. The pressing is what gives the sliced rounds their firm texture.
- Gills and saltspoonsTwo gills is one cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is half a teaspoon, which is assertive but correct for this pale dish.
- Oven heatNone is specified. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable choice for finishing the root vegetables in their covered pan; the liquid should reduce to a glaze rather than boil away.
- Cover the panThe recipe does not say whether the pan is covered, but a lid is the safer assumption: uncovered, one cup of water may not last thirty minutes and the carrots could catch in the butter.
- Vegetable scoopA small melon baller. The point is uniform pea-sized spheres of carrot and turnip that cook at the same rate and sit neatly in the centre of the ring; save the trimmings for stock.
- Peas at the endThree tablespoons of already-cooked peas need only two minutes of warming, exactly as written. Frozen peas can be substituted, though added straight from the bag they may need a little longer to heat through.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. Any fine sieve does the job; the aim is a clear braising liquid with no fragments of aromatic vegetable.
- Cocotte and cocottiereHere both mean the same earthenware vessel, a lidded round casserole that goes to the table. "Heat on the range" means setting it over low direct heat, which glazed earthenware tolerates poorly on a modern burner; use a heat diffuser, or warm the assembled dish in a 300F oven instead.
- YieldSix sweetbreads with this quantity of garnish and about a cup of sauce serve six as a first course, or three to four as a main dish.
Sweetbreads braised and served in their own covered earthenware pot belong to the French restaurant repertoire that American hotel and club cooking absorbed wholesale around 1900. The diced or scooped root vegetables with green peas is the garnish generally called printanière or jardinière, spring vegetables cut to a uniform shape, and the "crown shape" arrangement heaps the garnish in the middle. Sweetbreads were then a prestige item on menus in a way they no longer are in English-speaking countries: offal of any kind fell out of general favour after the Second World War, and the veal trade contracted, so a dish that once needed no explanation now begins with a phone call to a butcher. The cocotte here is the vessel rather than the baked egg dish that shares the name.