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Sweetbread Patties

Sweetbreads cooked in a thickened milk sauce and baked in pastry patty shells.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Sweetbread Patties

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Clean sweetbreads thoroughly and soak in salt water for 3-4 hours.

  2. Cut sweetbreads into small pieces, cover with water, and stew for 20 minutes.

Make the sauce and filling

  1. In a saucepan, heat milk and thicken with flour, then season with butter, pepper, and salt.

  2. Pour the sauce over the sweetbreads and cook for a few minutes.

Bake and serve

  1. Prepare a rich pastry crust, fill patty pans with the mixture, and bake until golden.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 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).

Flour and butter 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, meaty filling that forms the body of the patties.
Milk
Forms the base of the white sauce that moistens the filling.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce that holds the filling together.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the sauce.
Pastry
Forms the crust that encloses the filling and browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Thickening the milk with flour. Flour must be whisked in smoothly and the milk heated gently so starch can swell evenly; otherwise lumps form and the sauce stays thin or grainy.

“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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