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Fried Sweetbreads
Wash, trim and parboil sweetbreads for twenty minutes; drain, cut in slices, dip first into beaten egg, then in bread crumbs, and fry in boiling hot fat. Serve with cream sauce.
A short entry that assumes knowledge most cooks no longer have. The success of fried sweetbreads rests almost entirely on what happens before the breadcrumbs, so the preliminary steps deserve more attention than the original gives them.
- Soak before you parboilThe line "wash, trim" skips the step that makes the difference: soak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water, or lightly salted water, for two to three hours until they lose their pink tinge. Unsoaked sweetbreads stay bloody in the centre and taste metallic.
- What to buyVeal sweetbreads are sold as a pair of lobes: the rounder "heart" or belly sweetbread, which is strictly the pancreas, and the flatter "throat" sweetbread, which is the thymus. The rounder lobe is generally preferred for slicing and frying. Expect to order from a butcher rather than find them on a supermarket shelf.
- The parboilTwenty minutes at a bare simmer is at the long end but workable for a whole pair; small lobes need ten to fifteen. Add a spoonful of vinegar or lemon juice to the water to keep them pale. Boiling hard will make them spongy.
- Chill and press, which the recipe omitsStraight from the pot into ice water, then peel away the outer membrane and any fat or gristle. Press the lobes between two plates with a weight for an hour in the refrigerator. Only then will they slice cleanly into half-inch pieces instead of crumbling.
- "Boiling hot fat"The phrase most likely points to deep fat rather than a shallow pan. No temperature is given; modern deep-frying practice would be roughly 350-375F. Lard or a neutral oil both work; fry in batches so the temperature does not fall, about two to three minutes a side until the crumbs are deep gold. After a twenty-minute parboil the interior is already cooked, so you are only crisping the coating.
- Cream sauceIn cookery of this period the term generally means a plain white sauce: two tablespoons butter, two of flour, a cup of milk or thin cream, seasoned with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg. The recipe itself gives no proportions.
- YieldOne pair of veal sweetbreads, roughly a pound, serves three or four as a course.
Sweetbreads are the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb, and the name has nothing to do with bread or sugar: it is usually traced to older senses of "sweet" for mild-tasting flesh and "bread" from an Old English word for a piece or morsel. Through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth they were a delicacy rather than a thrift cut, treated as suitable for invalids and for company dinners alike. The parboil-slice-crumb-fry sequence here is the standard American treatment of the period, a simplification of the French method that would have larded and braised them; a cream sauce alongside was common. Their near-disappearance from ordinary cooking came later, hastened in Britain and Europe by BSE-era rules that classed bovine thymus from older cattle as material to be removed from the food chain, and more broadly by a general retreat from offal in the home kitchen.