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Sweetbreads with Tomatoes

A dish of sweetbreads simmered in tomato sauce with butter, flour, salt, cayenne, and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,923 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Sweetbreads with Tomatoes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tomato sauce

  1. Slice the tomatoes and stew them until they break down.

  2. Strain the tomatoes through a sieve into a saucepan.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the sweetbreads to the saucepan.

  2. Stir in the butter rolled in flour, along with salt and cayenne to taste.

  3. Just before serving, add the beaten yolks of the eggs.

  4. Serve in a deep dish with the tomato sauce poured over the sweetbreads.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Ripe tomatoes
Form the main body of the sauce, breaking down into a smooth, acidic base.
Sweetbreads
Provide the tender, delicate meat that the sauce is built around.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, rounding out the acidity of the tomatoes.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce gently and add richness when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat. If the sauce is too hot or boils after the yolks go in, they can scramble and turn grainy, so add them just before serving and keep the sauce below a simmer.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, pepper, egg):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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