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Stewed Sweetbreads

Stewed sweetbreads simmered in water with mace, butter, pepper, salt, and cream, finished with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Stewed Sweetbreads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Blanch the sweetbreads to draw out the blood and remove the sinews.

Stew

  1. Cover the sweetbreads with enough water to cook them and add the mace.

  2. Cook until tender, then pour off excess water for a nice gravy.

  3. Add a good-sized lump of butter, pepper, salt, and the cream.

  4. Mix the flour with the butter and stir it in.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with slices of lemon.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Mace + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,009 recipes
  5. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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
Provide the tender, delicate meat that forms the body of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour and helps give the gravy body.
Rich cream
Adds moisture and richness, softening the stew into a smooth, creamy sauce.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy through starch gelatinization.

The step that matters

Pour off the excess water after cooking. Too much liquid left in the pan dilutes the gravy and makes it thin. Pouring it off before adding butter, cream and flour lets the sauce concentrate and thicken properly.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

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