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Broiled Sweetbreads

Broiled sweetbreads seasoned with salt, pepper, and lemon butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Broiled Sweetbreads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Parboil the sweetbreads, then split them crosswise.

  2. Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

Cook and serve

  1. Broil for eight minutes.

  2. Make lemon butter by creaming 4 tablespoons of oleomargarine and slowly adding 2 tablespoons of lemon juice.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
The main ingredient, whose tender, delicate texture is the centre of the dish.
Oleomargarine
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, creamy base for the lemon butter.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the butter and cuts its richness.

The step that matters

Make lemon butter by creaming 4 tablespoons of oleomargarine and slowly adding 2 tablespoons of lemon juice.. Adding the acidic lemon juice slowly to the creamed fat helps it emulsify into a smooth sauce. Adding it too quickly can make the butter break or look curdled.

“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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