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Fried Sweet-breads

Fried sweetbreads are parboiled, seasoned, coated, and fried until light brown.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 22,662 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Fried Sweet-breads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Parboil the sweetbreads in salted water until done.

  2. Remove and dry them with a cloth.

  3. Cut the sweetbreads in half and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

Fry

  1. Coat them in flour and fry in hot lard until light brown.

  2. Alternatively, fry them with egg and bread crumbs or grated crackers.

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. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + breadtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,383 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

Sweetbreads
Main protein that is cooked, sliced and fried as the dish.
Flour
Forms a dry coating that helps the outside brown in the hot lard.
Lard
Hot fat that fries the coating and gives it a golden-brown finish.
Egg
Binds the bread crumbs or crackers so they adhere to the sweetbreads.

The step that matters

Drying the parboiled sweetbreads. Surface moisture turns to steam in hot fat and can make the coating spatter and fry unevenly. Drying them well helps the coating adhere and brown properly.

“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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