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Stewed Sweet-bread with Champignon

A stew of sweetbreads and champignons flavored with butter, cayenne, Madeira or sherry, thickened with flour and browned with burnt brown sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Stewed Sweet-bread with Champignon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Parboil the sweetbreads, then remove all skin and fat.

  2. Cut the sweetbreads into small pieces and place them in a saucepan with the chopped champignons and their liquid.

Cook

  1. Add the butter and a pinch of cayenne pepper.

  2. Cook the champignons for 30 minutes before adding the sweetbreads.

  3. Just before serving, stir in the Madeira or sherry, thicken with flour, and brown with burnt brown sugar.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Pepper + sherrytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: piperonal (bitter, coconut).

Butter and flour 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
Provide the tender, meaty body of the stew.
Champignons
Add savoury, earthy flavour and moisture to the stew.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour through the stew.
Madeira or sherry
Adds acidity and sweet, wine-based aroma near the end of cooking.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the sweetbreads after the mushrooms. Cooking the champignons for 30 minutes first lets their liquid release and reduce, building flavour before the delicate sweetbreads go in. Adding them too early risks overcooking and toughening the sweetbread.

“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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