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Veal Sweetbreads
(Animelle di vitello) Keep in fresh water for an hour. Then place them in a skimmer (ladle with holes) and dip in boiling water or broth. After a brief boiling remove and cool in cold water. Then remove the veins and gullet, taking care not to tear them.
The sweetbreads are prepared in various ways and here we give some of the best known:
Sweetbreads with butter. Boil in broth or water, clean and cut into slices. Brown a piece of butter with salt and pepper. Then place the sliced sweetbreads and brown them. Before serving squeeze on a little lemon juice. The sweetbreads prepared in this way are served preferably with rice or vegetables. - Sweetbreads with white sauce. Boiled, cleaned and cut into slices, they are placed in white sauce or balsamella (No. 54) adding a taste of nutmeg, pepper, salt and the juice of half a lemon.
Sweetbreads in fricassee.-Boil, trim and cut into pieces. Then brown in butter with a scallion chopped fine. Once browned, remove from the gravy in which pour a tablespoonful of flour, moistened with broth. The sauce that results is bound with egg-yolks and lemon juice.
Sweetbreads fried. -Boil and trim. Then cut in large slices, neither too thick nor too thin. Dip in beaten egg and in bread crumbs ground. Then fry in butter. Serve with vegetables. 158
A base method plus four finishes, written for cooks who already knew what a sweetbread looked like. The hinges are the soak, the blanch and — in the fricassee — keeping the yolks below a simmer.
- What you are buyingVeal sweetbreads are the thymus (the throat or neck pair) and the pancreas (the plumper "heart" or stomach sweetbread). Order ahead from a butcher; a pound serves three to four as a second course.
- Soak longer than an hourThe hour in fresh water is the minimum. Several hours or overnight in the refrigerator, with two or three changes of cold water, draws out the blood and gives the pale colour the recipe assumes. Keep them chilled throughout, never at room temperature.
- The blanch is brief"A brief boiling" means 2 to 3 minutes in barely simmering water or broth, just until the surface firms enough to peel. Longer and the interior turns dense and grainy. The plunge into cold water afterwards is what makes the membrane come away cleanly.
- "Veins and gullet"This is the outer membrane and the tough connective tubes running through the lobes. Peel with fingertips while the sweetbreads are still damp, keeping the lobes whole as the text warns.
- Press themNot in the original, but standard practice: after peeling, lay the sweetbreads between two plates with a weight on top and chill for an hour. They slice evenly and brown far better.
- BalsamellaThe book's No. 54 is béchamel — butter and flour cooked together, then milk. A medium sauce, roughly 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour to a cup of milk, is right for coating slices.
- ScallionThe "scallion" here may render scalogno, a shallot, rather than a green onion. One small shallot, finely chopped, per pound suits the dish either way.
- Binding the fricasseeWhisk the yolks with the lemon juice, temper with a ladle of the hot sauce, then return the lot to the pan off the heat and stir until it thickens. If it boils it will curdle. This holds for perhaps ten minutes on very low heat; serve promptly.
- Browning in butterButter alone scorches at the heat needed to colour sweetbreads. Use clarified butter, or add a spoonful of oil, and dry the slices well first. The fried version benefits from the same treatment.
This entry follows the pattern of Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina, the nineteenth-century household book by the Forlimpopoli-born Artusi, to which much of The Italian Cook Book's structure and cross-referencing habit is often traced: one master preparation, then a short catalogue of finishes, each assuming the cook will read the earlier numbered sauce entries. Animelle were a standard second course in a period when offal called for a cook with the patience for soaking, blanching and peeling. The four treatments here map the range of Italian domestic cooking at the time: plain butter and lemon, a French-derived white sauce, a fricassee bound with yolks in the manner borrowed from French practice, and the breadcrumbed fry.