Sweetbread Pie of a Suckling Calf

Translation:

Get the best part of the sweetbreads, cleaned as in the above recipe.  Give them a brief boiling in salted water, and beat them but not too much, with knives, adding in small chunks of marrow and a little prosciutto, fat and diced.  Mix in nutmeg, cloves, pepper, cinnamon and a little sugar and saffron, with that.  In spring (add) gooseberries, in summer, verjuice grapes, in winter raisins.  Have a pie casing ready of dough made of fine flour, egg yolks, a little rendered fat and salt… (Scappi p. 440. R. 10 Book V.)

Ingredients:

Package of sweet bread 1 – 1.5 lbs.

1 tsp salt

Pot with water

Prosciutto

Bone marrow

1 tsp. ground nutmeg, cloves, pepper, cinnamon

2 Tbs. Sugar

1 pinch saffron

2 C. Raisons

Redaction:

Gather your ingredients.

I found the smell to be my first warning this was going to be an interesting dish.  Sweetbread has a very distinctive odor. 

I added the sweetbread to salted water, giving it a quick 3-5 minute boiling bath.  Just enough to scum up. 

The sweet breads were then removed. 

Scappi says beat them with knives.  I can see why after trying to cut them. The sweetbreads are very…spongy.  It takes determination to get through the suckers.  I ended up cutting the sweetbreads into small bite sized pieces.

I didn’t have prosciutto on hand, or bone marrow.  I had to substitute bacon and butter.  Scappi wanted both mixed in with the sweetbread.  What I did was for presentations.  I added bacon to the sides of the pastry with butter on the bottom.  What I should have done (besides get prosciutto) was diced the 6-10 slices into chunks along with bone marrow (butter). 

I mixed the raisons, spices and sugar, then added the sweetbreads.

Everything went into the tart pan.  A lid was added.

Please note the small decorations at the top. 

They’re pretty but the function is to keep the eyes from noting the holes cut into the pastry so that it can vent the moist hot air slightly without ripping apart the crust.

Yeah… This one is a nope from me. I’m sure it was a delicacy. I’m sure it was someone’s favorite Scappi dish at one time. I just can’t. The texture is chewy. I can handle that. The spices and bacon made this a sweet and savory dish. It’s just the smell of sweetbreads, raw, cooking, cooked and biting into I can’t handle. I have done a dish with sweetbreads and eaten said dish. I am now good on ever doing sweetbreads again.