Skip to main content
Main

Creamed Sweetbreads

Creamed sweetbreads are sweetbreads cooked in a butter, flour, milk sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Creamed Sweetbreads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Remove tubes and membrane from the sweetbreads.

  2. Clean and parboil in boiling salted water for 20 minutes.

  3. Drain and plunge into cold water.

  4. Once cool, remove from water and cut into ½ inch cubes.

Make the cream sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a pan.

  2. Add the flour, salt, and pepper, mixing well.

  3. Gradually pour in the milk, stirring constantly.

Combine and serve

  1. Reheat the sweetbreads in the sauce before serving.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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, and starts the roux that thickens the sauce.
Flour
Cooked with the butter to form a roux that thickens the milk into a smooth cream sauce.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, giving it body and a mild, creamy flavor.

The step that matters

Gradually pour in the milk, stirring constantly. Adding milk all at once to the butter and flour can leave lumps. Pouring slowly while stirring lets the starch disperse evenly and thicken the sauce smoothly.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes