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Sweetbreads, Saute

A dish of parboiled sweetbreads coated in egg and cracker dust, then sautéed in butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Sweetbreads, Saute

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Parboil and blanch the sweetbreads.

  2. Cut them in half lengthwise, then cut each half into two pieces.

  3. Sprinkle the sweetbreads with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

Coat and cook

  1. In a saucer, beat the egg with 1 tablespoon of water.

  2. Dip each slice of sweetbread first in the egg mixture, then in cracker dust.

  3. In a skillet, heat 2 tablespoons of butter until very hot.

  4. Add the sweetbreads to the skillet and cook until well browned.

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. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + eggtop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Pepper and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 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
Main protein; searing browns the outside while the inside stays tender.
Egg
Binds the cracker dust to the sweetbreads so the coating adheres during cooking.
Cracker dust
Forms a crisp coating that browns in the hot butter.
Butter
Conducts heat to brown the coating and adds rich flavour.

The step that matters

Cook until well browned in very hot butter. Butter must be very hot before the sweetbreads go in, so the coating sears quickly and browns instead of soaking up fat and turning greasy or pale.

“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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