Skip to main content
Main

Larded Sweetbreads

Larded Sweetbreads are parboiled sweetbreads larded with butter, seasoned, baked, and served with cream or poulette sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Larded Sweetbreads

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Lard the parboiled sweetbreads in even rows.

  2. Sprinkle the sweetbreads with flour, coarse sea salt, and black pepper.

  3. Bake the sweetbreads in a 400°F (200°C) oven until brown.

  4. Cut the sweetbreads into cubes.

Serve or assemble

  1. Serve the cubes with white sauce on toast, patty cases, or timbale cases.

  2. For ramquin dishes, mix sweetbreads with cream or poulette sauce.

  3. Butter the dishes.

  4. Fill the dishes two-thirds full.

  5. Cover the dishes with buttered crumbs.

  6. Bake the dishes for eight minutes.

  7. Serve immediately, optionally adding mushrooms or oysters.

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. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Cream + mushroomtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,500 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Flour and butter 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

Sweetbreads
Provide the tender main body of the dish, cooked until browned on the outside.
Flour
Dusts the surface so it browns more evenly and helps the coating hold.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the buttered crumbs brown in the oven.
Cream or poulette sauce
Adds moisture and richness so the sweetbreads stay soft rather than dry.
Buttered crumbs
Form a golden, crisp top layer during the final baking.

The step that matters

Baking the sweetbreads until brown. Browning comes from the Maillard reaction at high oven heat, which adds flavor and color. Cooking too little leaves them pale and bland; cooking too long dries the interior.

“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.

You might also like

Mushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes