Skip to main content
Main

Veal Sweetbreads Roasted

Roasted veal sweetbreads coated in egg, breadcrumbs, and clarified butter, served with butter sauce, gravy, glaze, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Veal Sweetbreads Roasted

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil sweetbreads in a saucepan of water with a little coarse sea salt.

  2. Remove sweetbreads and place them in a basin of cold water until cool.

  3. Beat the egg in a dish.

  4. Skewer the sweetbreads and secure them on a spit.

Roast and serve

  1. Brush the sweetbreads with the beaten egg.

  2. Sprinkle bread crumbs over the sweetbreads, then drizzle with clarified butter, and add more bread crumbs.

  3. Roast for 15 minutes.

  4. Remove from the skewer and serve on a dish with hot butter sauce mixed with a spoonful of gravy, a small bit of glaze, and a squeeze of lemon juice.

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

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

  2. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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, with a tender, delicate texture when boiled and roasted.
Egg
Acts as a binding wash so the bread crumbs adhere to the sweetbreads.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating that browns in the oven.
Clarified butter
Adds fat that helps the crumbs brown evenly and adds rich flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter sauce.

The step that matters

Cool the sweetbreads fully after boiling. Chilling in cold water firms the tissue and stops cooking, so the sweetbreads hold their shape and are easier to skewer and coat without falling apart.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, bread, butter, sauce):

  1. Figfits about as well
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Pumpkinfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, bread, butter, sauce. 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 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes