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Oysters, Sweetbread and

Sweetbread, oysters and bacon threaded on skewers, coated with seasoned crumbs, fried in butter and served with lemon and brown gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Oysters, Sweetbread and

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbread

  1. Soak the sweetbread in cold water for 1 hour.

  2. Boil the sweetbread in salted water for 10 minutes.

  3. Cut the sweetbread into pieces the size of an oyster.

Assemble the skewers

  1. Beard the oysters and mix them with the sweetbread and bacon.

  2. Sprinkle with pepper, salt, parsley, shallot, thyme, and bread crumbs.

  3. Place the sweetbread, oysters, and bacon alternately on small skewers.

Fry and serve

  1. Fry in hot butter until lightly browned.

  2. Remove the skewers and serve on a hot dish.

  3. Squeeze lemon juice over the dish.

  4. Pour brown gravy on top.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  3. Thyme + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Shallot + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,476 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

Sweetbread
Provides the tender, rich-textured meat that forms the body of each skewer.
Oysters
Add briny, delicate flavour and a soft, juicy bite against the crisp coating.
Bacon
Renders fat during frying, adding savoury flavour and helping the skewers brown.
Bread crumbs
Coat the pieces and absorb fat, giving a light golden crust when fried.
Hot butter
Conducts heat for frying and promotes browning and a rich, nutty aroma.

The step that matters

Fry in hot butter until lightly browned. Butter browns quickly and can burn before the centre heats through. Keeping the heat moderate and the skewers turned lets the crumb coating brown evenly while the sweetbread and oysters cook through.

“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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