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To Fry Sweet-breads

Fried sweetbreads served with a hot water gravy seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Fry Sweet-breads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Wash the sweetbreads and boil them in salted water for about 15 minutes.

  2. Remove the sweetbreads from the water and let them cool.

  3. Skin and cut the sweetbreads in half, then season them with pepper and salt.

Fry and serve

  1. Dust a little flour over the sweetbreads and fry them slowly in equal parts of butter and lard until golden brown.

  2. Place the fried sweetbreads on a dish.

  3. Dust a little flour into the pan with the fat, stir well, and pour in the hot water.

  4. Season the gravy with salt and pepper, and once it boils, pour it over the sweetbreads and serve hot.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender when boiled and then crisp-browned when fried.
Flour
Forms a light coating that browns in the fat and thickens the pan gravy.
Butter and lard
Fat for frying that browns the coating and adds rich flavor.
Hot water
Liquid that, combined with the pan flour and fat, makes the gravy.

The step that matters

Fry slowly in the butter and lard. Slow frying over moderate heat lets the flour coating turn golden brown without burning, while the sweetbreads cook through and keep a tender 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.

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