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Stewed Sweetbreads
Take a pair of plump sweetbreads, cover with salt and water, and let stand one hour; wash in cold fresh water, put in a saucepan with boiling salted water and let bo'l for twenty minutes. Take up and set aside to cool. When very cold, trim off all the gristle and loose skin and put the sweetbreads in a saucepan with a cupful of chicken or veal stock; set over a slow fire to simmer gently for ten or twenty minutes.
A plain, sound treatment of sweetbreads that follows the classic sequence of soak, blanch, cool, trim, braise. A few of the timings reflect an era when sweetbreads were sold less fresh than they are now.
- What a "pair" isA veal sweetbread comes as a pair: the longer, raggedier throat sweetbread (the thymus) and the round, plump heart or stomach sweetbread (the pancreas, the noix). A pair of veal sweetbreads today runs roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb and would serve two to three as a main course, though the book does not say. Order them ahead from a butcher; they are rarely sitting in a supermarket case.
- The soak is the hingeThe hour in salt and water draws out blood, without which the finished sweetbreads look grey and taste faintly of iron. Use about a tablespoon of salt per quart of cold water, keep the bowl in the refrigerator rather than on the counter, and change the water once or twice until it stays pale.
- Twenty minutes of boiling is too longTwenty minutes of boiling is long by modern standards -- Fresh sweetbreads are usually blanched 3 to 5 minutes at a bare simmer, just until the outside sets and turns opaque, then dropped straight into ice water. Twenty minutes at a full boil tends to leave them dense, and the later simmer will not bring them back.
- Press while they coolThe recipe says only to cool them, but the standard practice is to cool them flat between two plates with a light weight on top, an hour or more in the refrigerator. Pressed sweetbreads slice cleanly and hold together in the pan; unpressed ones tend to fall into lobes.
- TrimmingWork on the cold, firm sweetbread. Peel off the outer membrane and pull away the tough connective tissue between the lobes, but do not strip every fibre or the piece disintegrates. Expect to lose a fair amount of weight in trim.
- "A slow fire"A bare simmer with only an occasional bubble, roughly 180 to 190F. Ten to twenty minutes in a cupful of stock is a gentle braise, not a boil; hard bubbling squeezes the sweetbreads and clouds the stock.
- Stock and finishingA cupful barely covers them, so turn the pieces once. The original stops here, which leaves you with sweetbreads and a small amount of concentrated liquid. Recipes of the period often thickened such liquid with a little butter and flour, or enriched it with cream, and poured it over the sweetbreads on toast.
- Handling and storageSweetbreads are highly perishable. Use them within a day of purchase, keep them cold through the soak, and cook the blanched glands the same day or the next.
Sweetbreads were a familiar feature of the well-off American table around 1900, and cookbooks of the period often treat them at length: stewed, broiled, larded, creamed, in patties, in croquettes. They were a by-product of the veal trade, and were prized as delicate enough to count as company food. The name has nothing to do with bread or sugar; it is generally traced to an older sense of "bread" meaning a piece or morsel of flesh, with "sweet" distinguishing the mild-tasting gland from stronger offal, though the derivation is not certain. The sequence of soak, blanch, cool and braise remained broadly standard in professional kitchens well into the twentieth century.