This Sweetbread Isn’t a Baked Bakery Item

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha and Grant. This is Kevin calling from St. Louis, Missouri. How are you?

Doing well. How are you?

Up until recently, my wife and I lived in New Orleans, and we had went to this French restaurant that my wife had really wanted to go to with some friends of ours.

And I’ve been a vegetarian my whole life, but I really haven’t had too much of an issue finding things on most menus.

But when we got to this French restaurant, I could not find any vegetarian dishes on this menu.

So I kept looking through it, and the people at my table were kind of getting aggravated that I was taking so long.

So I found something on there that was called sweetbreads, and I went ahead and ordered that.

So in my mind, I’m picturing like some kind of savory breads, maybe with cheese or maybe honey and nuts or something.

But it was very expensive, so I was hoping it was going to be a good meal.

They deliver it to the table, and it’s like these four little round balls on my plate, and they were breaded.

So I was thinking that they were still bread.

They were like hush puppy-sized.

So I took a bite of one of them.

I was chewing it up, trying to figure out what in the world kind of bread is this.

And about right when I swallowed, a bunch of alarm bells went off in my head.

Oh, this may not actually be bread.

So I had called the waitress over.

I told her, hey, I ordered the sweetbreads, but I cannot figure out what kind of bread this is.

And she had said something about, oh, this is the hearts and the throats.

And I said, wait, what is the heart of a bread?

I’ve never really heard of that.

And then she went on to explain that it was like lamb organs or some such.

And I just about blacked out from there.

But it was definitely not bread as I thought.

So I wanted to call you and see if you guys thought, like I do, that this is some sort of malicious misnomer, like the trick people into eating something that’s so unappetizing.

Oh, Kevin, Kevin, Grant and I have been cringing.

We started about halfway through your story just cringing here.

Oh, my God.

You ordered sweet bread off the menu, but it was not bread.

Bless your heart.

Sweet breads, actually.

It’s usually in the plural.

So traditionally, it’s the thymus gland or pancreas of like a lamb.

Mark Morton in his book, The Cupboard of Love, says, the name is surely the result of an early and brilliant marketing ploy on the part of butchers everywhere.

It’s easier to get people to buy and eat it if you call it sweet breads.

Here, have a thymus.

Have a breaded thymus gland.

No, that isn’t right.

Yeah, but there are lots of different kinds of them, right?

Yeah.

Like heart sweetbread and stomach sweetbread and belly sweetbread.

You know, I had a similar experience at Columbia University.

I spent a year abroad in Paris.

And my first week there, I went to a restaurant.

My French wasn’t very good.

They had kind of pushed me too fast into the deep waters of French.

And I was kind of struggling my way to the surface.

But on the menu, I recognized the word for lamb.

And I was like, I love lamb.

I will have some lamb.

And I ordered lamb.

And it comes.

And it’s on the plate kind of by itself, this unadorned lamb kidney.

Is the most disgusting-smelling, foul-looking thing that I’d ever seen in my life.

I did not take a bite of it.

I paid to the tab and left, but at least it wasn’t disguised by a breaded coating like yours was.

Oh, Kevin.

Yeah.

My wife has had a great time telling this story to all of my friends who know my eating habits.

She finds it pretty funny.

Yeah, we don’t really know why it’s called sweet bread.

By we, we mean the two of us and just the language historians in general don’t know why it’s called sweet bread.

It’s a mystery, but I love the theory that just somewhere along the way, this butcher’s like, all right, how can I make some money off this stuff that otherwise would go to the hogs?

Well, you know, it could be like a marketing kind of thing.

Like in New England, they say Cape Cod turkey when they mean codfish.

Oh, I see.

Rocky Mountain oysters.

Yeah, Rocky Mountain oysters, I was going to say, or Welsh rarebit, which doesn’t have any rare meat in it or rabbit in it.

Yeah.

Well, cool.

Kevin, thank you for sharing your story.

I really appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you for looking into that for me.

It was a pleasure talking with you.

And you do have our sympathies.

That’s really painful for a vegetarian.

I have to say, I was a vegetarian completely in college now that I think about it.

And I went to a friend’s house, and he was cooking something up, and I thought that he handed me a mushroom.

And so I took a bite of this thing that he handed me from the pot.

It was elk.

Oh.

Elk.

Oh, no.

That memory still gives me some nightmares.

I know.

Yeah, yeah.

I get a little queasy.

Take care, Kevin.

Call us again sometime.

All right.

Will do.

Thank you.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

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