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Sweet Breads.— No. III.

A stew of sweetbreads, ham, onion, herbs, and spices, served with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Sweet Breads.— No. III.

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Lard the sweetbreads with slips of bacon.

  2. Open the sweetbreads and stuff them with force-meat.

  3. Fasten the stuffed sweetbreads with wooden skewers.

  4. Roast the sweetbreads before the fire until the top is browned.

Stew

  1. In a stew-pan, place the slice of ham, sliced onion, pepper, salt, mace, and sweet herbs.

  2. Add the sweetbreads to the pan.

  3. Cover the pan.

  4. Stew over low heat for 15 minutes.

  5. Cover the sweetbreads with boiling water.

  6. Stew gently for 1.5 hours.

Serve

  1. Dish the sweetbreads.

  2. Strain the gravy.

  3. Pour the gravy over the sweetbreads.

  4. Garnish with 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Onion + macetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

  5. Ham + oniontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,159 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and rich after slow stewing.
Bacon
Adds fat and savoury flavour that slowly melts into the sweetbreads during cooking.
Onion
Releases sweetness and aroma into the stewing liquid as it cooks.
Ham
Contributes salty, smoky depth that seasons the stewing liquid and gravy.

The step that matters

Stew gently for 1.5 hours. Sweetbreads are delicate, and a hard boil can toughen their proteins and break them apart. Keeping the liquid at a gentle simmer lets the connective tissue soften slowly and keeps the meat tender and intact.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, onion, pepper, lemon):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, onion, pepper, lemon. 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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