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Sweetbreads, Stewed

Stewed sweetbreads simmered in white stock with pepper, salt, mace, thickened with flour and butter, finished with cream and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Sweetbreads, Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Soak the sweetbreads for 1 hour.

  2. Boil the sweetbreads quickly for 10 minutes.

  3. Place the sweetbreads in cold water for 20 minutes.

Stew

  1. Lay the sweetbreads in a saucepan.

  2. Pour the white stock over the sweetbreads.

  3. Add pepper, salt, and mace to the saucepan.

  4. Simmer gently for 30 minutes.

  5. Remove the sweetbreads and keep them warm in the oven.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Thicken the gravy with flour and butter.

  2. Let the gravy boil until smooth.

  3. Stir in the cream.

  4. Add lemon juice to the sauce.

  5. Pour the sauce over the sweetbreads before serving.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

Flour and butter 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

Sweetbreads
Main protein; soaking, boiling and cold water firm and clean the tissue before the gentle stew.
White stock
Liquid that gently cooks the sweetbreads and forms the base of the gravy.
Flour
Starch that thickens the gravy as it boils.
Butter
Fat that combines with flour to form a roux, adding richness and smoothness to the gravy.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, rounder texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Let the gravy boil until smooth. Flour needs to boil to fully swell its starch and lose its raw floury taste; stopping early leaves the sauce lumpy and pasty.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, flour, butter, cream, lemon):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, flour, butter, cream, lemon. 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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