A Family Food Memory

I am not a strong proponent of the “eat the whole animal” movement. Call it conditioning or inclination, but when it comes to eating offal I find myself often at a loss of appetite. The textures and tastes of different internal organs are wholly unique and it is not those qualities of the food that suffocate my appetite. When cooked like any other meat and sauced and seasoned properly they can smell and taste like any other part of the meal. The issue is that internal organs (and other less traditional American bits), unlike sausages which are made from those parts and are delicious, never stop looking like guts. A testicle will always look like a testicle no matter how you truss it up. However, as my father demonstrated with the brussel sprout, collard green, and turnip, he had an incredible power to break down my entire lifetime of trained resistance to a type of food with one meal. He has a way of taking your preconceived notions about a meat, a vegetable, or a grain and transforming it into something that doesn’t just make you want to keep eating but makes you want to go tell your friends to eat it too. Despite his gifts, my father generally knew better than to serve me innards because he knew that I harbored my strongest reservations against them. And so, when I discovered a lumpy sack of grey matter on the kitchen table one evening last year, I was not altogether surprised, but thoroughly dismayed when my father informed me that the bag contained sweetbreads, and they would be on the dinner table tonight.

Sweetbread is an etymological mystery and a threat to the uninformed and offaly unwilling diner. The description is usually reserved for the pancreas of a veal calf thought it sometimes includes the pancreases of other animals. When the completed dish is served on the plate it looks nothing like a pancreas should. In both name and appearance the sweetbread is a culinary Houdini. But all of that kitchen sleight of hand belies an unpleasant reality: the sweetbread spends minutes in the pan cooking and likely even less time being eaten but spends hours in the kitchen being prepared and throughout looking unsurprisingly like…a pancreas. It was in this unfortunate state that I encountered the evening’s meal. It was my misfortune not only to be a diner at the table this evening but, because sweetbread preparation takes a long time and is labor intensive, also a party to the preparation of the meal.

My dad started by taking the sweetbreads out of their lumpy sack and placing them on the table. Their initial appearance was that of brains bound with the intestinal membranes used to make sausage. My dad tried to comfort me by informing me that the first step in sweetbread preparation, an all night soak in cold water had been taken care of for him. The grey, lifeless, blobs on the table next to me seemed no better for their bath. Perhaps because my father had read my mind, or because he was following through on some ancient recipe that his teacher had passed onto him in his youth, he informed me that the sweetbreads would be taking another dip, this time in boiling water for a few minutes. It was my wish that the little pancreases boil until they were inedible, but under my dad’s watchful eye we slid the slops into a pot and let them alone for a few minutes. We removed the sweetbreads from the hot water and iced them down to stop the cooking process. I was starting to think that sweetbreads was a single person operation and I was considering an escape to the living room with its heat belching fireplace, and mom watching bad courtroom TV shows with my siblings. The sweetbreads in front of me could turn your desires to anything else in an instant. Then my father finally brought me to task on the meal. I was charged with the responsibility of removing connective tissue from around the sweetbreads. That substance that looked like sausage casing all around the flesh had to be removed, by hand, and it was my responsibility to see to it. By now, the squishy brains had tightened up to the consistency of dried out bread dough. The flesh would give a little bit but no longer appeared as though it might at any moment deflate and ooze off of the table. I nevertheless touched the sweetbreads with incredible tenderness. I could not escape the feeling that if my brains were ever handled by aliens I would hope they would show the same respect and dignity that I was showing the veal pancreases in front of me. Removing the tissue is relatively easy because it is done by hand. You have to dig into the flesh slightly to tear away at the membrane but it tugs off in satisfying, complete pieces as you go. Once I completed my assignment, my dad and I looked down on my handiwork. After he fixed the places where I missed some of what he called “unpleasant parts” and what I thought could have referred to the whole pancreas, he explained the next step. We took the grey, doughy, lumps and laid them out on a pan. Then we laid a towel and a second identical pan overtop of the sweetbreads. On top of the press went a heavy pan. The plan was to compact the sweetbreads and flatten them out so that they can be cooked as medallions. Then my dad announced the best words I had heard all day: “you can go do other stuff now I don’t need your help anymore.”

Faster than on Christmas day, I raced into the living room to be with the rest of my family. I could now go to work compartmentalizing the things I had just seen, and the squishy objects I had just touched, away from the dish I was soon to eat. Every organ dish before had let me down, but I had never been so close to the preparation process either. I felt a strange tearing between my participation in making the sweetbread dish and my desire to avoid eating them. In what felt like a few minutes of contemplating, but was likely closer to an hour and a half, my dad called all of us into the kitchen to eat. The dish that was on the plate in front of me looked nothing like the pancreases I had first encountered a few hours ago. And not only did it look good but the family collectively agreed that it tasted good too. The sweetbreads had a velvety texture, like a pate. They were light but made crispy on the outside because my dad pan fried them. What had started out as lifeless gray lumps had been transformed into a rich and flavorful meal. I realized that cooking has an incredible power of transformation. Being in a family of cooks means learning to appreciate how raw, rough, and seemingly undesirable things can often transform into the most delicate and satisfying of dishes if you take the time to prepare them right.