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Peppers Stuffed with Sweetbreads

Peppers stuffed with a sweetbread and cream mixture, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 ↓

Peppers Stuffed with Sweetbreads

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Simmer sweetbreads in boiling salted water with lemon juice for 5 minutes, then cut into small cubes.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt butter in a pan, then stir in flour and cook for 1 minute.

  2. Add chicken stock and cream, season with salt and pepper, and cook for 10 minutes.

  3. Stir in sweetbreads and mushrooms if using.

Fill and bake

  1. Fill the peppers with the mixture, top with buttered crumbs.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until golden and serve on rounds of toast.

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. Chicken + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,172 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-butyl acetate (fruity, banana).

  3. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

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

  5. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Provide the tender, rich meat that forms the filling's main body.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and helps the flour cook into a smooth base.
Flour
Thickens the butter and stock into a smooth, stable sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and body, making the sauce silky and thicker.
Chicken stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and adds savoury flavour.
Buttered crumbs
Browns in the oven to give the topping a golden, crisp finish.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the butter. Cooking the flour for a full minute removes its raw starch taste before the liquid goes in, and lets it thicken the sauce smoothly without lumps.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Coconutfits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Avocadofits about as well
  4. Mangofits less well

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