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Calf's Sweetbread, Stewed

Stewed calf sweetbread simmered in veal broth, thickened with flour and butter, seasoned with mace, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Calf's Sweetbread, Stewed

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbread

  1. Soak the sweetbread in warm water for 1 hour.

  2. Boil the sweetbread for 10 minutes, then drain.

Cook and serve

  1. Simmer the sweetbread gently in the broth for 30 minutes.

  2. Dish the sweetbread and thicken the broth with flour and butter.

  3. Season with mace, pepper, and salt, and heat without boiling.

  4. Pour the sauce over the sweetbread and garnish with toast snippets.

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. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Veal + macetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,761 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Veal + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,049 recipes

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

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

Sweetbread
Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender when gently simmered in liquid.
Veal broth or stock
Provides the cooking liquid that flavours the sweetbread and becomes the base of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the broth into a smooth sauce that clings to the sweetbread.
Butter
Adds richness and body to the thickened sauce.

The step that matters

Heat without boiling. Once the sauce is thickened with flour, boiling can cause it to break or become lumpy and dull in flavour, so it should only be heated gently.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Sagefits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, flour, butter, pepper. 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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