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Stewed Sweetbread with Champignon

A stew of sweetbread and champignon mushrooms, flavored with butter, red pepper, Madeira, and thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Stewed Sweetbread with Champignon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Parboil the sweetbread and remove all skin and fat.

  2. Chop the sweetbread and place it in a saucepan with the chopped champignon and its liquid.

  3. Add the butter and a pinch of red pepper.

Cook and finish

  1. Cook the champignon for 30 minutes before adding the sweetbread.

  2. Just before serving, stir in the Madeira and thicken the mixture with a little flour.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Sweetbread
Forms the main body of the dish, giving it a tender, meaty texture when cooked gently.
Champignon
Adds savoury flavour and moisture, releasing its liquid into the sauce as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and giving the sauce a smooth mouthfeel.
Madeira
Adds sweetness and aroma, deepening the flavour of the sauce when stirred in at the end.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a sauce by swelling with heat and binding the moisture.

The step that matters

Cook the champignon before adding the sweetbread. Cooking the mushrooms first drives off excess water and concentrates their flavour, so the sauce does not become watery once the sweetbread is added.

“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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