Skip to main content
Main

Sweet Breads

Sweetbreads are boiled, breaded, and fried, then served with a sherry and lemon sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Sweet Breads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil sweetbreads for 10 minutes to blanch, then transfer to cold water.

  2. Remove the membranes and lard the sweetbreads.

  3. Roll in grated bread crumbs, pepper, and salt.

Fry and make the sauce

  1. Fry in boiling lard until tender.

  2. In a separate pan, combine hot water, sherry, nutmeg, and lemon juice.

  3. Thicken the mixture with flour and pour over the cooked sweetbreads.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  4. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Nutmeg + breadtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,997 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Provide the tender, delicate meat that forms the centre of the dish.
Grated bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned coating that protects the sweetbreads during frying.
Flour
Thickens the sherry and lemon liquid into a smooth sauce.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aroma to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances richness.

The step that matters

Fry in boiling lard until tender. The lard must be hot enough to brown the crumb coating quickly. If it is too cool, the coating absorbs fat and turns greasy before the sweetbreads cook through.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sherry, nutmeg, flour, pepper, bread):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Limefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sherry, nutmeg, flour, pepper, bread. 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.

More sweetbread recipes

Salad 73Croquettes 61Fried 37Fricassee 27Broiled 19Pie 19 See all 37 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes