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Sweetbreads Stewed

A stew of sweetbreads cooked with butter, flour, mace, salt, pepper, and optional parsley, garnished with lemon slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Sweetbreads Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Parboil the sweetbreads until tender.

  2. Place them in a stew pan with water or milk.

Make the stew

  1. In a bowl, mix the butter and flour together until smooth.

  2. Add the butter mixture to the pan along with mace, salt, and white pepper.

  3. If desired, stir in chopped parsley.

Serve

  1. Garnish with thin slices of lemon 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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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, delicate meat that forms the body of the stew.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour, and with flour helps thicken the liquid.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth, body-rich sauce when combined with butter.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour mixture to the pan. Flour mixed into butter must be stirred smooth before it goes into the liquid; otherwise lumps form that do not disperse easily. Stirring the thickened liquid keeps the sauce even.

Swap the parsley

The recipe marks parsley as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, butter, flour, mace, white pepper, lemon):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Cardamomfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, butter, flour, mace, white pepper, lemon. 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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