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Calf's Sweetbreads, Stewed

Stewed calf sweetbreads simmered in flavored stock, finished with egg yolk and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 44,316 recipes. Both carry (e,e)-2,4-decadienal, which smells fatty, deep fried. The science ↓

Calf's Sweetbreads, Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the sweetbreads

  1. Place the sweetbreads in a stewpan with flavored stock and simmer gently for 45 minutes.

  2. Remove the sweetbreads and place them on a hot dish.

Make the sauce

  1. Take the gravy off the heat for a minute, then gradually add the egg yolk.

  2. Return to a gentle heat until the sauce thickens, but do not let it boil.

  3. Just before serving, squeeze in the 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. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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
Gentle simmering in liquid turns them tender and moist.
Flavored stock
Cooks the sweetbreads and forms the base of the gravy.
Egg yolk
Its proteins thicken the gravy as it warms, adding richness.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk and heating the sauce. Egg yolk proteins thicken the sauce, but if the gravy is too hot when the yolk goes in, or it boils afterward, the proteins tighten and curdle, leaving the sauce grainy instead of smooth.

“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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