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Lakded Sweet-breads with Pease

A dish of sweetbreads braised and served with peas in a cream gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Lakded Sweet-breads with Pease

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. Soak the sweetbreads in cold water for 1 hour, change the water, and soak for another 30 minutes with a little coarse sea salt.

  2. Wipe the sweetbreads dry with a clean cloth and use a larding needle to draw strips of sweet salt-pork through them, leaving ½ inch projecting.

Cook and brown

  1. Place the sweetbreads in a skillet, cover with hot water, and simmer slowly for 30 minutes.

  2. Remove the sweetbreads from the water and place them in a small dripping pan with a little butter, ½ cup of water, and a sprinkling of flour.

  3. Set the pan in a 400°F (200°C) oven and brown delicately.

  4. Add ½ cup of cream just before removing from the oven; if there is no cream, use milk and a little butter.

  5. Season with pepper and a little salt if the pork hasn't salted them sufficiently.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Place the sweetbreads on a platter.

  2. Heat ½ pint of cream and stir it into the gravy in the pan.

  3. Sprinkle a little more flour into the gravy before adding the cream and let it boil for 1-2 minutes to thicken.

  4. Pour the gravy over the sweetbreads and serve with boiled and seasoned peas around them.

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

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

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

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

  3. Bread + peastop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together804 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexyl acetate (fruity, apple).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Bread + porktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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 (in the method)
Tender, delicate meat that is the main dish and softens with slow simmering.
Sweet salt-pork
Renders fat into the pan and seasons the sweetbreads as they cook.
Butter
Adds fat that helps the sweetbreads brown and carries flavor.
Flour
Thickens the pan juices into gravy and helps the surface brown.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the gravy.

The step that matters

Boiling the flour-thickened gravy. Flour must be cooked in hot liquid for a minute or two so its starch swells and thickens the gravy. Stirring it in before the cream and boiling briefly helps prevent a raw, floury taste and lumps.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Beansfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, pork, butter, cream, pepper, flour. 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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