Skip to main content
Main

Sweet Breads

A casserole of fried sweet bread pieces topped with a creamy sauce of sweet cream, flour, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Sweet Breads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweet breads

  1. Scald the sweet breads in salt and water, then remove the stringy parts.

  2. Soak the sweet breads in cold water for a few minutes and dry them with a towel.

  3. Dip each sweet bread in egg and coat with bread crumbs.

Fry and make the sauce

  1. Fry the coated sweet breads in butter until browned and place them in a hot dish.

  2. In the same pan, combine sweet cream, a little pepper, coarse sea salt, and chopped parsley.

  3. Add flour to the pan and bring the mixture to a boil.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the sweet breads in the dish.

  2. Add mushrooms if desired.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

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

  5. Bread + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sweet breads
Main protein; the tender, delicate texture is the centrepiece of the dish.
Egg
Binds the bread crumb coating so it adheres to the sweet breads.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned coating when fried in butter.
Butter
Fat that fries the coating to a golden brown and adds richness.
Sweet cream
Forms the base of the sauce, adding richness and a smooth body.
Flour
Thickens the cream sauce as it comes to a boil.

The step that matters

Add flour and bring the sauce to a boil. Flour must be cooked into the cream as it heats, or it stays raw-tasting and lumpy. Boiling activates the starch so the sauce thickens evenly and coats the sweet breads smoothly.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Tarragonfits about as well

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

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipes