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Dessert

To Prepare Sweetbreads

A method for cleaning and boiling sweetbreads to remove blood and impurities.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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To Prepare Sweetbreads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak sweetbreads in clear cold water and vinegar for 1 hour to draw out the blood.

  2. Put sweetbreads into fresh cold water and add salt.

  3. Heat very gradually and boil for 20 minutes.

  4. Drain and place sweetbreads back into cold water.

Clean

  1. Once thoroughly cold, remove all veins, strings, and fibers without breaking the sweetbreads.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The step that matters

Heating very gradually. Bringing sweetbreads to a boil slowly keeps the delicate tissue from toughening and breaking apart. Rapid heating tightens the proteins and can cause the meat to seize and split.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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