April 11, 2001
The Chef, Gabrielle Hamilton: Sweetbreads, Naturally
By GABRIELLE HAMILTON and AMANDA HESSE
• <A HREF="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/11/living/111CREX.html">Recipe: Fried Sweetbreads</A> 
This is the third of eight columns by Gabrielle Hamilton, the chef and owner 
of Prune in Manhattan. They are being written with Amanda Hesser.
WITH a French mother, I grew up eating tripe, brains, kidneys and 
sweetbreads. So to serve sweetbreads in my restaurant — which rests on a 
foundation of home cooking — is not a rite of passage to the ranks of haute 
cuisine; rather it comes as naturally to my menu as succotash.
I don't sauté them in butter and finish them with cream or truffles. I 
preserve them in their purest state by frying them like chicken-fried steak. 
I brine them to draw out any excess blood, then simmer them until they're 
firm and just cooked through. And when an order comes in, I roll one in 
flour, beaten eggs and panko, the coarse, dry Japanese bread crumbs, before 
dropping it in a deep fryer.
While it sizzles away, I sauté a thick, meaty piece of bacon in butter and 
finish the sauce with capers and caper juice. The sweetbread emerges from the 
oil looking like a great big nut-colored bread crumb. I slice it thickly like 
a loaf of country bread, pour over the bacon and caper sauce and shower it 
with a squeeze of lemon. The sweetbread remains tender and moist, none of its 
strong flavor masked by the sauce. The capers and bacon contribute salt, and 
the lemon, well, it tries to do its best to balance the richness. 
It is a wonderful dish, but it means more to me than most really good things. 
I think of it metaphorically: sweetbreads, which come from calves, are the 
thymus gland and, over time, they shrink and disappear. 
As a woman working in kitchens, I spent years trying to be strong and tough, 
smoking unfiltered cigarettes, eating raw steak, drinking bourbon, ignoring 
burns on my hands, all to prove myself to the "boys." That side of my 
personality, like some unnecessary gland, has shrunk over the years. Now I 
know who I am. \from NY Times