I stand corrected.

In my last column I told about my daughter’s biology class dissecting animal parts for DNA research.  I mistakenly reported that the girls in the class were not at all reluctant to slice and dice the dog testicles.  I was wrong.  It was more a pummeling and grinding action with a pestle.

I also discussed the cuisine of various animal parts, one of which was “sweetbreads”.  I always thought it was cow brain, mostly because that’s what I’ve always been told.

When I say “cow”, I don’t mean a female in particular.  “Cow” (to those of us who don’t raise them) means one of those animals from whence steak comes.  There is no gender applied to steak or other conversations having to do with bovines in general.

The first book we read to our babies says, “The dog says bow-wow, the cat says meow, and the cow says moo.”  We didn’t grow up knowing there were different words for males, females, and those unfortunate ones that have lost their manhood.

So I said “cow” and to be perfectly accurate, I should have said “calf” because it turns out sweetbreads only come from prepubescent cattle.

And they are not brains at all.  One reader emailed me and said sweetbreads referred to the thymus gland, another told my husband that it was the pancreas.

So I looked it up.  Turns out they’re both right.  The dictionary says, “sweetbread:  the thymus or sometimes the pancreas of a calf, lamb, etc., when used as food; usually used in the plural.”

What the heck is a thymus?  I had to look it up next. 

I found, “Thymus: originally a warty excrescence; now refers to a gland in the upper thorax or neck of all vertebrates, involved in the production of lymphocytes.  In humans, it is most prominent at puberty, after which it disappears or becomes vestigial.”

It was becoming an endless cycle.  The dictionary always defines words we don’t know with other words we don’t know.  Now I needed to find what “excrescence”, “lymphocytes” and “vestigial” meant. 

I really got the general idea, though, when it said “warty excrescence”.  I’m figuring this thymus gland looks pretty gross if it has the word “warty” anywhere in the definition.  And I continue to wonder who on earth was the first person to eat one of these things?  And why would you eat something that looked like the Wicked Witch of the East?

“Excrescence” means (1) a normal outgrowth or appendage, as in a fingernail, or (2) an abnormal or disfiguring outgrowth or addition, as in a bunion.  So we have the same word for a normal or an abnormal outgrowth?  A nose is an excrescence, and a wart on a nose is also an excrescence, so theoretically we could say, “You have an excrescence on your excrescence.”  Go figure. 

I moved on to the word “pancreas”.  We’ve all heard about the pancreas, but how many really know what it does and where it is?  Well, since I had the trusty dictionary out, I figured it was time to find out.

“Pancreas: a large elongated gland situated behind the stomach and secreting a digestive juice into the small intestine.”  I was somewhat surprised that I knew all the words in the definition.

In summary, the result of my research produced these results: 

(1) Eating a warty excrescence is disgusting.

(2) Eating a gland that secretes digestive juice is not much better.

(3) Sweetbreads are gross, no matter where they come from.

I’ll have to get back to you on what “lymphocytes” and “vestigial” mean.