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Sweetbreads Baked, with Peas
Trim two pairs of sweetbreads and parboil for twenty minutes. Take up, lard each sweetbread, put them in a baking pan, dredge with flour, salt and pepper; pour over a teacupful of white stock, and bake in a moderate oven for an hour. Baste frequently. Put a tablespoonful of butter in a frying pan, add a tablespoonful of flour, and mix until smooth; thin with a cupful of cream or milk; stir until boiling; add a can of French peas and let boil. Season with Dish the sweetbreads and arrange white pepper and salt. the peas around them. Serve very hot.
A straightforward braise-and-bake, but the timings belong to an era when sweetbreads were cooked until they were firm all through. Trim the fat, buy veal sweetbreads if you can, and cut the oven time hard.
- Buy the right gland"Two pairs" means the sweetbreads of two animals; a pair comprises the rounder heart (or belly) sweetbread and the longer throat sweetbread. Veal sweetbreads are the standard; lamb are smaller and cook faster. Allow roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb total for four servings.
- Soak before you parboilModern recipes generally call for soaking sweetbreads in several changes of cold water, or lightly salted water, for two to three hours in the refrigerator to draw out blood. The book skips this; it makes a visible difference to colour.
- Twenty minutes is too long a parboilBring them up in barely simmering acidulated water for 8 to 10 minutes, then plunge into ice water and peel away the membrane while they are cool and firm. Press between two plates with a weight for an hour if you want tidy slices. A full twenty-minute boil followed by an hour in the oven leaves them dry and grainy.
- LardingThreading strips of pork fat through the meat with a larding needle, to keep it moist. Few kitchens have the needle now. Draping the sweetbreads with thin bacon or barding fat, or simply basting with butter, does the same job.
- Teacupful and white stockA teacupful in books of this period is usually reckoned at somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 cup. White stock is unbrowned veal or chicken stock; a light chicken stock is the usual substitute.
- Oven and timeA moderate oven is usually taken as about 350-375F. An hour is far more than pressed, parboiled sweetbreads need -- 25 to 30 minutes, basting two or three times, is enough to glaze them and reduce the stock.
- French peasCanned petits pois, small and soft. Frozen petits pois are the closer modern match; add them to the finished cream sauce and heat through for a minute rather than boiling them, which is what the canned ones could stand and fresh ones cannot.
- The garbled lineThe seasoning sentence has been scrambled in the original setting. It should read: season with white pepper and salt, dish the sweetbreads, and arrange the peas around them.
Sweetbreads -- the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb, despite the name having nothing to do with sugar or with bread -- were a luxury item in American households at the turn of the twentieth century, sold at a premium and treated as a delicate white meat fit for invalids and dinner parties alike. Their appearance in a general household manual like this one shows how routinely a middle-class cook was expected to handle organ meats that most home kitchens no longer touch. The pairing with a cream sauce and canned French peas is pure period restaurant style: the peas signal the imported tin, which was itself a mark of refinement, and the whole dish belongs to the same white-on-white aesthetic that produced creamed chicken and oyster patties. The name is generally traced to Old English usage in which "bread" derived from braed, a word for flesh or roast meat, though the etymology remains contested.