Home › Sandwiches › Sweetbread Patties (Soak two sweetbreads in salt)
Sweetbread Patties (Soak two sweetbreads in salt)
Soak two sweetbreads in salt and cold water until white; parboil them for twenty minutes, take up and let cool, remove all the skin, fat and gristle, cut with a silver knife into small squares, set aside. Put a cup of veal stock into a saucepan with a dozen mushrooms, and set on the stove to boil. Put a tablespoonful each of butter and flour together in a small pan and stir over the fire until it bubbles; pour over a cupful of the stock, and stir until smooth; season with salt and white pepper, lay the sweetbreads in and let simmer for twenty minutes; take them up, boil the sauce down until thick, and add two tablespoonfuls of whipped cream. Pour over the sweetbreads and stir until well mixed. Fill patty shells with the mixture and serve. Delicious.
A turn-of-the-century ragoût of veal sweetbreads in a reduced velouté, spooned into pastry shells. Most of the work happens before the sauce, and the soaking and skinning are what decide whether the dish is good.
- The hinge: soak, then peel while warmThe long soak in cold salted water draws out blood and is what makes them white; change the water two or three times over an hour or more. Peel off the membrane and gristle as soon as they are cool enough to handle — once fully cold the skin clings and tears the meat.
- What a sweetbread isThe thymus (the elongated throat sweetbread) or pancreas (the round heart sweetbread) of a calf or lamb; both are sold as sweetbreads. They are usually a special-order item from a butcher rather than a supermarket case; a pair of veal sweetbreads will often come to somewhere around 1 to 1½ lb total. Buy them pale and firm and use them the day you get them.
- The silver knifeNot a flourish. Carbon-steel blades of the period discoloured pale meats and acidic foods; silver did not. Any modern stainless knife does the job.
- Parboil, then don't overdo itTwenty minutes of parboiling plus twenty in the sauce is on the long side for veal thymus — 15 minutes in barely simmering water is enough to firm them, and 8 to 10 minutes in the finished sauce brings them through without turning them grainy.
- Veal stock and the mushroomsUnsalted veal or light chicken stock; the recipe boils a dozen mushrooms in it for flavour, then only calls for the liquid. Slice small white or cremini mushrooms and return them to the sauce rather than discarding them.
- Sauce proportionsA tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of stock gives a thin velouté on purpose — it is reduced afterwards. Season with white pepper rather than black so the sauce stays pale.
- Whipped cream at the endTwo tablespoons of cream whipped to soft peaks, folded in off the heat. It lightens the sauce; if it boils after that it will break and there is no point to it.
- Patty shells and yieldFrozen puff-pastry vol-au-vent cases, baked and the centres lifted out, are the closest modern equivalent. The recipe gives no yield; the quantity should fill roughly eight small shells, or about four first-course servings.
Sweetbreads were among the most genteel things a nineteenth-century American kitchen could serve: expensive, perishable, requiring careful handling, and therefore a reliable signal of a good table. Filling baked pastry shells with a creamed ragoût was the standard treatment for such delicacies at luncheons and receptions, alongside creamed chicken and oyster patties; the shell made a rich mixture portable and let a hostess serve it to a standing room. The instruction to cut with a silver knife dates the recipe as clearly as anything in it — carbon-steel cutlery of the period stained pale meats grey, and cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s seem often to repeat the warning for sweetbreads, apples and salad greens alike. The Twentieth Century Cook Book files this under sandwiches, though not because anyone put it between bread.