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Sweetbreads Braise, with New Carrots
Soak in cold water for two hours six heart sweetbreads. Lay a thin slice larding pork on top of each and tie with string. Scrape and wash twelve new carrots, place them in an earthen cocotte dish with six finely chopped shallots and half ounce butter; lay the breads on top, season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper and cook on the range for ten minutes. Moisten with a gill white wine and a gill demi-glace and set in oven for thirty minutes. Turn and baste the breads once in a while. Remove, untie, take off lard and skim fat from surface of gravy. Finely chop a quarter bean garlic, one branch parsley, one branch of chervil and add to the breads; lightly mix, then cook for four minutes longer and serve in the same cocotte dish.
A straightforward oven braise, but the original assumes a professional larder where sweetbreads have already been soaked, blanched, pressed and trimmed, and where demi-glace sits ready in a stockpot. Sort those two things out and the rest is a 40-minute dish.
- The hinge: blanch and peel before braisingAfter the two-hour cold soak, the usual modern practice is to blanch the sweetbreads three or four minutes in barely simmering salted water, cool them, then peel away the outer membrane and any gristle and press them under a weighted plate. Skipping this leaves the membrane to tighten in the oven and pull the lobes into a rubbery knot.
- "Heart" sweetbreadsThe heart sweetbread is the rounder lobe, lying near the heart; the elongated "throat" sweetbread comes from the neck. It is generally reckoned the better of the two. Six pieces suggest six portions. Order ahead from a butcher and use them within a day.
- Larding porkA thin sheet of fresh pork back fat, tied over the meat to keep it from drying and browning too hard. Unsmoked salt pork sliced very thin, or a sheet of caul fat, does the same work; thin-cut streaky bacon changes the flavour with smoke.
- CocotteA small round earthenware or enamelled casserole that goes from stovetop to oven to table. A 10-inch cast-iron braiser or any lidded flameproof dish that holds the six pieces in one layer works. Earthenware straight onto a modern element is a good way to crack it.
- Oven heatNone is specified. A moderate oven, 325-350F, suits a 30-minute covered braise in this little liquid; hotter and the gill of wine reduces to nothing before the meat is done.
- Gill, saltspoon, beanA gill is 1/2 cup, so 1/2 cup white wine and 1/2 cup demi-glace. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, making two of them 1/2 teaspoon white pepper. A "bean" of garlic is a clove; a quarter clove, finely chopped, is the whole intention here.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock, thickened in the old kitchens with espagnole sauce. Good tinned or frozen demi-glace is sold now; failing that, reduce 1 1/2 cups strong brown veal or beef stock to 1/2 cup. Stock cubes are too salty for a braise this short and this shallow.
- New carrotsSmall young carrots, scraped rather than peeled, left whole. Twelve of them will be tender in the 30 minutes given. Full-grown supermarket carrots want halving lengthwise or they will still be firm when the meat is ready.
- The final four minutesGarlic, parsley and chervil go in raw at the end and are barely cooked through, which is the point: the braise supplies depth, the herbs supply lift. Chervil fades fast once heated, so add it last and serve straight from the dish.
Sweetbreads held a place in early twentieth-century menus that is hard to imagine now, appearing in hotel dining rooms as a light entree between fish and roast, and the heart lobe of the veal thymus was the cut people paid for. This recipe is classic hotel-kitchen method in miniature: a bed of aromatics, a fat covering tied on, a short braise in wine cut with demi-glace, and a finish of raw chopped herbs cooked in for a further four minutes, all served in the same little cocotte it cooked in so nothing is lost in transfer. Filippini's International Cook Book gathers hundreds of such dishes from his years at Delmonico's in New York, which is why the instructions assume house demi-glace and a larder of prepared sweetbreads rather than telling a home cook how to get either. The pairing with new carrots marks it as a spring dish, from a period when "new" still meant the first thinnings of the season rather than a year-round bag.