English

A cooked veal sweetbread

Noun

gutbread ‎(plural gutbreads)

1. The pancreas, especially the pancreas of livestock used as food.
   • 1909, The Pharmaceutical Journal, volume 29, London: J. Churchill, ISSN 0031-6873, OCLC 701741133, page 819:

     Having spent many years in the slaughterhouse, I can perhaps enlighten your correspondent as to what sweetbreads are. The "throat-bread" is undoubtedly the thyroid, and the "gut-bread" the pancreas. […] But I was informed that the gut-bread, i.e., the sweetbread of dictionaries and doctors, is "given to paupers or thrown away."

   • 1928, Thomas Barlow Wood; Leslie Frank Newman, Beef Production in Great Britain, Liverpool: R. Silcock & Sons, OCLC 504869788, page 27:

     (3) The throat bread (thyroid gland)

     (4) The heart bread (thymus gland) These form a "set" of sweetbreads.

     (5) The gut bread (pancreas)

   • 1965, Joan O[live] Joshua, “Pancreas, Liver, Spleen, Peritoneal Cavity”, in The Clinical Aspects of Some Diseases of Cats, London: William Heinemann Medical Books, OCLC 752738250, page 84:

     The feeding of raw pancreas has been advocated and claimed to be effective but the difficulty of ensuring a regular supply of fresh gutbreads, quite apart from doubts as to the effect of gastric digestion, makes this treatment of dubious value.

   • 1967, Araneta Journal of Agriculture, volume 14–15, Malabon, Metro Manila, Philippines: Araneta Institute of Agriculture, OCLC 637414566, page 181:

     Gerrard discloses that the pancreas is sometimes substituted for sweetbread and is referred to as gutbread in English slaughter houses.

   • 2004, H[erbert] W. Ockerman; L. Basu, “By-products”, in Werner K. Jensen, Carrick Devine, ‎and Michael Dikeman, editors, Encyclopedia of Meat Sciences, volume I (A–F), Oxford: Elsevier Academic Press, ISBN 978-0-12-464970-5:

     The brownish-yellow lobulated pancreas is called ‘gut bread’ or ‘stomach sweetbread’ and weighs approximately 170 g in market-weight beef animals and 85 g in sheep and pigs.

   • 2006, Marina Bänke, transl., A[leksei Vladimirovich] Yablokov, R. Braun, and U[te] Watermann, editors, Chernobyl 20 Years After: Myth and Truth, 2nd edition, Münster: Agenda Verlag, ISBN 978-3-89688-278-3, page 72:

     The summarized data from various states show that in the most contaminated regions the incidence rate of gut-bread cancer rose ten times during 1991–1994 if compared with the period of 1986–1990 (Radiation level..., 2000, par. 258, p. 52).

   • 2007, Martin Edwards, Control and the Therapeutic Trial: Rhetoric and Experimentation in Britain, 1918–48 (The Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine; Clio Medica; 82), Amsterdam; New York, N.Y.: Editions Rodopi, ISBN 978-90-420-2273-7, page 45:

     A case report from Ernest Neve, senior surgeon at the Kashmir Mission Hospital, provided the final item of support for raw gland therapy. […] Cunningham Affleck, an Edinburgh physician, shared Neve's frustration with the idiosyncrasies of butchers and slaughterhouse workers. He discovered that they generally supplied thymus or thyroid glands in place of pancreas when asked for ‘sweetbreads’. It was necessary, he cautioned, to specify ‘long bread’ or ‘gut bread’ in order to receive pancreas. Those who had found pancreas unpleasant had probably been supplied with the wrong organ, for true pancreas was ‘quite pleasant and palatable’.

Alternative forms

• gut-bread, gut bread

Synonyms

• pancreas
• sweetbread (one sense)
  • belly sweetbread
  • heart sweetbread
  • stomach sweetbread