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Calf's Sweetbread

A dish of calf sweetbread simmered in stock and sauce, finished with lemon and served with toasted bacon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,646 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Calf's Sweetbread

Ingredients

Directions

Parboil

  1. Parboil the sweetbread in the white stock for 20 to 30 minutes.

  2. Remove the sweetbread and divide it in half.

  3. Set one half aside for the next day.

Make and serve

  1. Make a sauce similar to chicken fricassee.

  2. Add the sweetbread to the sauce and simmer for 15 minutes.

  3. Stir in lemon juice to achieve a pleasant sharpness.

  4. Serve with neat squares of toasted bacon.

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. Lemon + oniontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Calf's sweetbread
Forms the main body of the dish, with a tender texture after parboiling and simmering.
White stock
Cooks the sweetbread gently and supplies the liquid base for the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, savoury sauce.

The step that matters

Parboiling the sweetbread. Sweetbread is delicate and can turn firm or dry if overcooked. Gentle simmering in stock sets its texture, so keep the liquid at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil.

“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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