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LOS ANGELES — When I was young in France, sweetbreads were considered a health food. The thymus and pancreas glands from veal are sweet and creamy. They are served crisped, sometimes with a lemon and caper sauce, or with a veal demi-glace, and, to my preferences, with almonds. Liver, brains, sweetbreads, tongues, and animal genitals all used to be common offerings on old restaurant menus—indeed, my grandfather used to pickle beef tongue, and always ordered liver with onions or a calf’s foot.
As steak became more available and prestigious, and eaters have become more removed from, or repulsed by, the reality of food, guts have largely disappeared from cooking. When was the last time you went out and ordered a big calf’s liver in vinegar sauce? They, like sweetbreads and tongues, used to be standard fare. Sweetbreads have just barely survived the dulled modern American palate, which has banished guts from its table. One still finds this fine offal on menus in a few fancy places, even in Los Angeles.
Sweetbreads were central to my life in Paris in the ’90s when I trained to cook at the Zygomates, a long-lost pioneering site of bistronomy on the rue de Capri, on the edge of the 12th arrondissement in Paris, where, for years, I had lived in a room above the restaurant. I first brought my daughter to France when she was 18 months old, and when I returned so many years later, the Zygomates was still my base and so I plunked her on the red velvet banquette against the wall.
The Zygomates’ chef-owner, my friend and personal savior, Patrick Frey, didn’t ask what my daughter wanted to eat. The master chef and Savoyard peasant sent her out a heaping portion of sweetbreads with demi-glace and sugary shallots, gleaming in the rich sauce. With...
Jacob Soll is professor of history and accounting at the University of Southern California. His newest book is Free Market: The History of an Idea.
Chronicle / Alamy
