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Grilled Sweatbreads
About 25 years ago, at the Feast of San Gennaro, there was a man who grilled sweetbreads over a charcoal fire. For a few years, his time at the fair overlapped with my time of living downtown, and I remember clearly his leathery face and knarled hands. He was the stereotype of the weather-beaten southern Italian working man. For a few nights a year, for a very few years, I could walk to his set-up on Mulberry St., buy his plump, smoky sweetbreads and take them home to eat, instead of having to eat them standing up among the hordes in Little Italy.
He was old then. He must be gone now. He certainly hasn't been a fixture at San Gennaro for a long, long time. Fortunately, I loved his sweetbreads so much that I couldn't stand it that I was able to eat them for only one week in mid September. I had him teach me how to make them, and the recipe is in my long, out-of-print cookbook, "Cooking in a Small Kitchen," which was published in 1979.
Several weeks ago, a listener asked me about the old man and his sweetbreads. I was thrilled that someone else remembered him and them. But I am embarrassed to say I don't remember his name, if I ever knew it, only his recipe.
Grilled Sweetbreads
Makes 2 generous servings
The old man's sweetbreads were wrapped in caul fat, the web-like coating of delicate pork fat that surrounds the pig's kidneys. The fat is used to wrap strips of lightly pre-cooked sweetbread into bundles, while it makes the sweetbreads more succulent. Eventually, by the end of the cooking time, the fat browns and gives the soft sweetbreads a crisp finish. Back in the ancient 1970s, when I got this recipe, one could easily buy caul fat in an Italian pork store, German pork store, or at a good butcher. Nowadays you have to order it. Because most of the rest of America couldn't get caul fat at all, then and probably still, or pancetta, another Italian possibility, I specified bacon in the following. Use smoked bacon if you like, although unsmoked bacon (such as Oscar Meyer's basic bacon) will give a more southern Italian taste.
1 pound sweetbreads
1 teaspoon vinegar in cold water
1/2 teaspoon salt
Fresh-ground black pepper
Salt
1 teaspoon dried thyme
8 to 10 slices bacon (or use pancetta or caul fat)
Soak the sweetbreads for 1 hour in a bowl of cold water to cover by about an inch with 1 teaspoon of vinegar. Drain.
Place the sweetbreads in a saucepan of boiling water salted with 1/2 teaspoon salt. Cook for 5 minutes. Drain and allow to cool.
Remove the bits of fat from the sweetbreads along with any coarse membrane that keeps the lobes of the sweetbreads together.
Cut the sweetbreads into approximately 3-inch-long pieces. Season liberally with pepper and lightly with salt. Crush the thyme between your fingers and sprinkle all over the sweetbreads.
Wrap a piece of bacon around each sweetbread, trying to enclose as much as possible, if not the whole. Secure bacon to sweetbreads with toothpicks or small trussing skewers.
Place as far away as possible from the heat in a gas or electric broiler. Cook about 15 minutes, turning twice. (Of course, these are even better cooked over charcoal on a barbecue.)
