Home › Vegetables and Salads › Sweetbread Salad
Sweetbread Salad
(Austria.) Parboil one pair of large sweetbreads and cut them into dice; in cooking them season the water with onion, carrot, celery, and parsley, or else cook them in some white broth. Mix the pieces with an equal amount of cooked green peas, and cover with mayonnaise. Stir well; serve on a border of lettuce. This is both dainty and good.
A cold composed salad of veal sweetbreads and peas, of the kind that turned up at luncheon tables around 1900. Most of the work is in the preparation of the sweetbreads themselves, which the recipe assumes you already know.
- "Parboil" here means cook throughThe sweetbreads are served cold with no further cooking, so they must be fully cooked in the court bouillon, not merely blanched — poach at a bare simmer until firm all the way through, about 15-20 minutes for large veal sweetbreads. Offal spoils quickly and should be chilled promptly once cooked.
- Soak and peel firstThe recipe skips the standard preliminaries. Soak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water for a few hours to draw out blood, then after poaching, cool them and pull away the outer membrane and any gristle before dicing.
- Press themCooling the poached sweetbreads under a light weight between two plates for an hour firms the texture and makes clean dice easier. Unpressed, they are softer and more likely to break up under the knife.
- "One pair of large sweetbreads"A pair means the two glands taken from one animal — the round heart sweetbread and the longer throat sweetbread — roughly 1 to 1.5 lb together. Butchers today often sell one of the two on its own, so buy by weight.
- White brothA light unbrowned veal or chicken stock. The alternative given — water with onion, carrot, celery and parsley — is a plain court bouillon; a squeeze of lemon in it keeps the sweetbreads pale.
- PeasAn equal volume of cooked green peas. Frozen peas dropped into boiling salted water for two minutes and then into ice water are closer to the intended sweet, bright result than anything tinned.
- MayonnaisePeriod mayonnaise was made by hand with raw yolk and would generally have been thicker than jarred, and sharpened with lemon or vinegar to taste. If you make your own, use pasteurised eggs for a dish that will sit cold on a buffet.
- YieldOne pair of sweetbreads with an equal quantity of peas serves four as a first course, two as a light lunch. Dress it no more than an hour ahead; the lettuce border goes limp.
Sweetbreads — the thymus and pancreas of a young calf — were a luxury item in the Vienna kitchen, where Kalbsbries appeared in soups, vol-au-vents and cold entrées, and the attribution "(Austria.)" places this among the borrowed national dishes that the book collects. The recipe belongs to a moment when American and British households were being taught to cook the whole animal with French technique: sweetbreads were expensive precisely because each calf yields so little, and a cold sweetbread salad bound with mayonnaise was a way of stretching a small, prized quantity into a dish for a table. Sweetbreads fell out of ordinary domestic cooking in the English-speaking world over the twentieth century and are now largely a restaurant ingredient, usually seared hot rather than served cold.