Sweetbreads

I have recently established quite a neat relationship with one wonderful little organic farm down in Hampshire. Rother Valley and I have developed a mutually beneficial friendship, where I try to, let's say, assist with potential business, and they, in turn, supply me - for a fee of course - with a glory of organic meat. The farm specialises in pure Aberdeen Angus beef - soulful, compact cows with melancholic eyes - but they also link up with farms around, that provide other meats - chicken, pork, lamb - as well as game.

An Aberdeen Angus

I use them, however - and I mean use - to source those weird and wonderful things, that most of their clients don't want, but for which I have space in my heart and belly - offal, really fatty or chewy parts. So far I have had pig trotters, pork belly, ox tongue; have also tried to buy brains and cows feet but with less luck. Sam, who runs the show at Rother Valley, has once wondered if I 'was making a Frankenstein'..

Last week it was the turn of sweetbreads. What a bizarre name for an equally bizarre part of a body. The thyroid and the thymus of a young sheep or a calf that has apparently acquired its name because of its mild, sweet flavour (the bread is an old English word for flesh). I find there is almost something sexy about the name, an image of a young wholesome wench in Swiss Alpes with jugs of creamy milk springs into mind..

I have wanted to try cooking sweetbreads for some time now, and then Rother Valley agreed to deliver a handful of these little breads to me for free, I had to act quickly - they really do taste better as fresh as a daisy (that Swiss maid obviously still lingers in my mind).

How to prepare sweetbreads:

1. put them into a bowl of cold water and leave to soak for good 2-3 hours.

Sweetbreads a la naturel, just before soaking

2. Bring a saucepan of water to boil, put your sweetbreads into it, turn down to simmer and poach for 3-5 minutes.

Sweetbreads cooked, shrivelled

3. Prepare a bowl of iced water and plunge the cooked breads into it for a couple of minutes. Take them out and take off the outer layer, which is like a thin see-through leather. Dispose that and any grisly or fatty bits.

4. Dust the breads in a little of seasoned flour and fry them quickly (2-3 minutes each side) in a pan with plenty of butter. They should be crispy on the outside and delicate and fluffy on the inside. they go beautifully with more robust flavours, such as bacon.

Fried sweetbreads with bacon

The picture above is rather pathetic, I know, but the result was quite moorish (although to my taste the sweetbreads came out a bit too mealy - overcooked I think).

This is how sweetbreads are supposed to look.

Sweetbreads with pea puree and bacon (photo thanks to blog.timesunion.com)

I would suggest wrapping smaller pieces of sweetbreads in bacon, perhaps with some buttered sage and serving them fried, with a little toast, as zakuski, with shots of chilled, but not frozen vodka.

The beauty of pig trotters

Arent’ they fun?! A test to an omnivore kinda dish, I say. Yes, not only did I buy these pink creatures quite on purpose (the all organic tootsies of a - hopefully! - happy piggy), but cleaned them, boiled them until no more, dismantle them and put them all together into a glorious Soviet grandmotherly dish of kholodets, or pork in aspic, or ham and chicken terrine.

The name Kholodets stems from a Russian word meaning cold, frozen or chilled. The dish basically consists of shredded boiled meat (which can be anything from chicken to rabbit to beef), jellified by the means of a pork stock, made out of pig trotters (the bones and other tissue in the feet make the liquid go jelly-like when chilled. In fact – read closely, my vegetarian friend - all jelly like treats are made with at least some use of a pig essence). I believe the must have it roots in the Fresh obsession with everything jellied in the 18-19 centuries (and as everyone knows Russians were bonkers about the Fresh in those far away days). The wobbly and transparent texture must have signified something bizarrely sophisticated and - yes - fun.

I'd been dreaming of re-creating this dish of my childhood for years, battling the seeming impossibility of sourcing the named tootsies from local butchers. Kholodets could in the past be found in any canteen or restaurant throughout the Communist kingdom - in different shapes and disguises; but I always remember the long evenings at home, in our kitchen, when my mum would slowly go through buckets of just-boiled meat, carefully separating the edible tasty bits from not so. Her utilizing all the possible plates, cups, bowls and saucers in our house to make the little individual portions of kholodets - a bit of meat on the bottom of a plate, some crushed garlic, then goes the stock and in the fridge for 12-24 hours. My mum almost always used chicken meat and put lots of garlic, so the result was incredibly tender, delicate and flavoursome at the same time. We ate out little kholodets (ki?) out of the bowls where it’d been chilling, with some nose-bitingly Russian mustard or grated horseradish and, of course, black Russian rye bread.

Well, I repeated the experiment the other night, freakily enjoying the sweet and meaty smell of chicken and trotters boiling my kitchen away for good 4 hours (take the trotters and bony joints of chicken, add cold water, a few spoons of vinegar, onion, carrots, lots f salt and spices - basically chuck the ‘left overs procedure’). And this is the initial result:



I felt like a villain – a wonderful, life-affirming feeling!

My kholodets was more of a fresh terrine - an ample amount of meat in each bowl (with added parsley, cracked pepper and garlic, which I mistakenly omitted) and only enough stock to cover the filling (no more than a cm or so).


Voila! (sorry about the amateur-ish photo)

Have your pig trotter concossion with some pickled cucumbers (mine were very spicy with lots of chillies), a lovely fresh salad, soughdour (home-made in my case, but this may be optional) and - an absolute requirement which was refused to me in my years of pioneer youth - a shot of very, very cold vodka.
Na zdaravye, tovarishi.