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Sweet Breads

Sweet breads boiled, drained, cut, floured, fried in ghee, served with sauce or on buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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. Trim the sweet breads and wash them well.

  2. Place them in cold water with the lemon juice and salt; bring to a boil. Stir occasionally with a wooden spoon.

  3. Once boiled, refresh them under cold water, drain, and cut in half lengthwise.

Fry and serve

  1. Dry them with a clean cloth, dredge with flour, and fry in ghee until golden brown.

  2. Serve with sauce, ham, bacon, or force meat balls, or season with pepper and salt if served alone.

  3. Serve on buttered toast and garnish with egg sauce or gravy.

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. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Sweet breads
The main protein; boiling firms it so it can be cut and fried cleanly.
Flour
Dry coating that helps the outside brown and crisp during frying.
Ghee
Fat for frying that browns the flour coating and adds rich flavor.
Juice of ½ lemon
Acidity in the poaching water that gives a brighter, cleaner flavor.

The step that matters

Drying before dredging and frying. Moisture left on the sweet breads keeps the flour from sticking and makes the fat spatter and steam instead of browning, so pat them thoroughly dry first.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, flour, ghee, pepper, egg. 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.

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