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Larded Sweetbreads

Larded sweetbreads stuffed with bread, butter, spices, and lemon, then larded with bacon fat and lemon peel, baked and served with Madeira gravy.

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

Larded Sweetbreads

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Parboil the sweetbreads until half-cooked, then place them in cold water.

  2. Prepare a force meat by mixing grated bread, butter, pepper, salt, nutmeg, lemon peel, and beaten egg yolk.

Stuff and lard

  1. Cut open the sweetbreads and stuff them with the force meat, securing them with a skewer or string.

  2. Lard the sweetbreads with alternating strips of bacon fat and lemon peel using a larding needle.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until browned.

  2. Serve with gravy flavored with Madeira and enriched with a beaten egg yolk stirred in just 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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Main protein; parboiling and then baking gives a tender interior with a browned exterior.
Grated bread
Bulks out the force meat and absorbs butter and egg, keeping the stuffing moist rather than dense.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the force meat and helps the surface brown in the oven.
Beaten egg yolk
Binds the force meat so it holds together, and enriches the gravy when stirred in.
Bacon fat
Larding strips baste the sweetbreads as they cook, adding savoury flavour and moisture.
Madeira
Adds sweetness and aromatic depth to the gravy.

The step that matters

Stirring the egg yolk into the gravy. Egg yolk thickens and enriches sauces through gentle heat. Stirring it in just before serving, off a hard boil, keeps the gravy smooth rather than scrambled or curdled.

“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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