Skip to main content
Main

Sweetbreads

Sweetbreads stewed with veal gravy, lemon, bacon, pickled cucumbers, and garnished with celery, spinach, parsley, and barberries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cucumber and spinach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 355 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Sweetbreads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Put the sweetbreads in a saucepan of boiling water for 5 minutes.

  2. Remove them and let them cool, then cut a slit down the middle.

  3. Stuff the slit with bacon pieces, and place lemon peel and pickled cucumbers on each side.

Stew and thicken

  1. In a toasting pan, combine sweetbreads with veal gravy, lemon juice, and browning sauce.

  2. Stew gently for 15 minutes, then thicken with flour and butter.

Serve

  1. Serve with gravy poured over, garnished with boiled celery or oyster patties, stewed spinach, parsley, and barberries.

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. Cucumber + spinachtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together355 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Lemon + celerytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Celery + spinachtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together616 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

  4. Lemon + spinachtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,109 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Cucumber + celerytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,745 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Provide the tender, delicate meat that is the main body of the dish.
Bacon
Adds fat and savoury flavour that melts into the sweetbreads during stewing.
Veal gravy
Supplies the liquid and savoury base in which the sweetbreads stew.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth, cohesive gravy.
Butter
Adds richness and helps give the thickened gravy a smooth texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich gravy and balances its fat.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 15 minutes. Boiling or stewing too hard toughens the delicate sweetbread meat and can make it rubbery. A gentle simmer keeps it tender while the flavours blend.

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, veal, sauce, flour, butter, celery, spinach):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, veal, sauce, flour, butter, celery, spinach. 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.

More sweetbreads recipes

Stewed 38Fried 34Broiled 20Creamed 20Lamb 20Roasted 20 See all 24 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesSpinach SoupSpinach Soup50 recipesVeal PattiesVeal Patties50 recipes