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Three Sweetbreads and an Emince

A stew of sweetbreads cooked with bacon, stock, French beans, asparagus peas, and garnished with croutons or paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and asparagus match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 292 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Three Sweetbreads and an Emince

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Blanch the sweetbreads and set aside.

Cook

  1. Line the bottom of a stewpan with 3 slices of bacon.

  2. Place the sweetbreads on top of the bacon.

  3. Add ½ pint of stock and cover the sweetbreads with 3 more slices of bacon.

  4. Cook gently on low heat for about 30 minutes.

Plate and serve

  1. Prepare a rim of French beans around each sweetbread and a sprig in the middle.

  2. Keep the sweetbreads warm until serving.

  3. Serve the sweetbreads on a dish with asparagus peas and garnish with croutons or paste.

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. Beans + asparagustop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together292 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Asparagus + peastop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together808 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Beans + peastop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together949 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Provide the tender, delicate meat that is the centrepiece of the stew.
Bacon
Adds fat and smoky, savoury flavour as it renders into the stew.
Stock
Supplies liquid that gently cooks the sweetbreads and carries flavour.

The step that matters

Cook gently on low heat. Sweetbreads are delicate and toughen or dry out if boiled or cooked too hot. Gentle, low heat in a little liquid keeps them tender and moist.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, asparagus):

  1. Lima beansfits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Sesamefits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, asparagus. 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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