Home › Sweetbreads › Creamed Sweetbreads
Creamed Sweetbreads
Parboil a pair of sweetbreads, pick into small pieces, and chop fine with half dozen mushrooms. Put a tablespoonful of butter in a small saucepan and set on the range to melt; when hot add a tablespoonful of flour, mix until smooth, pour over half a pint of cream and stir until boiling; add the sweetbreads and mushrooms, set the saucepan in a kettle of hot boiling water and stir five minutes; season with salt and white pepper. Serve in shells or cases.
A short recipe that assumes you already know how to handle sweetbreads — which is where nearly all the work lies. Everything after the parboiling is a plain white sauce.
- A pair of sweetbreadsVeal sweetbreads are sold in pairs: the round, lobed "heart" or belly sweetbread and the longer "throat" sweetbread, which is the thymus. A pair weighs roughly 3/4 to 1 lb and is enough for four small servings.
- What "parboil" leaves outStandard practice is to soak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water for an hour or two until they whiten, then simmer them in salted acidulated water (sources give anything from five to twenty minutes), then plunge into ice water and peel away the outer membrane and any tubes while cold. Skip the soak and they stay pink-grey.
- Half a pint of creamOne cup. With a tablespoon each of butter and flour that gives a fairly loose sauce, which is what you want since the sweetbreads absorb some of it.
- The mushrooms need cookingChopped raw mushrooms added straight to the sauce will shed water and thin it. Sauté them in the butter first, or in a little extra butter separately, before building the roux.
- "Set the saucepan in a kettle of hot boiling water"A double boiler, improvised. It keeps the cream from catching and the sweetbreads from tightening; five minutes over the water is enough to heat through, not to cook further.
- Shells or casesScallop shells, small ramekins, or baked puff-pastry vol-au-vent cases. Any of these still works; individual gratin dishes with a brief pass under the broiler are the closest modern equivalent.
- SourcingOrder sweetbreads ahead from a butcher and use them within a day. What is generally sold is veal sweetbread; beef sweetbreads also turn up in the US, veal being the tender one this recipe assumes.
- SeasoningWhite pepper is specified so the sauce stays unspecked, and it matters more than it sounds — the dish is very pale and very mild. Salt firmly, and a scrape of nutmeg or a spoonful of sherry is period-appropriate if it tastes flat.
Sweetbreads — the thymus and, less often, the pancreas of a calf or lamb — were a delicacy in American and English kitchens through the nineteenth century, and the name has nothing to do with bread: its origin is in fact recorded as obscure, though the leading conjecture traces it to an older sense of bread or brede meaning flesh or a piece of roast meat, with "sweet" often said to distinguish it from the stronger-flavored organ meats. Creamed and served in shells or pastry cases, they belonged to the same family of genteel supper dishes as creamed oysters and chicken à la king, the sort of thing turned out on a chafing dish at a luncheon or after the theater. A book called the Twentieth Century Cook Book assumes its readers can buy a pair of sweetbreads without comment; the offal that once needed no introduction is now the special order, while the roux-and-cream method it describes has outlasted the ingredient it was written for.