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Sweetbreads a LA Poulette

Sweetbreads cooked with mushrooms in a white stock, thickened with roux and finished with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Sweetbreads a LA Poulette

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Parboil and blanch the sweetbreads.

  2. Once cold, cut them into neat dice.

  3. Add 1 tablespoon of chopped mushrooms for each sweetbread.

Make the sauce

  1. Place everything in a saucepan and cover with white stock or a mixture of butter and water, seasoning with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  2. Heat to a boil, then strain off the gravy.

  3. Return the gravy to the saucepan and keep the sweetbreads and mushrooms hot on a dish.

  4. Thicken the gravy with a white roux.

  5. Stir in a spoonful of cream and pour over the sweetbread dice.

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. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

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

  3. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Mushroom + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,500 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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 dish.
White roux
Thickens the gravy so it coats the sweetbread dice.
White stock or butter and water
Forms the liquid base of the gravy that carries the flavour.
Chopped mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and moisture to the dish.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier finish to the sauce.

The step that matters

Heat to a boil, then strain off the gravy. Boiling the sweetbreads and mushrooms in stock extracts flavour into the liquid, which is then strained to make a clear base. Holding the liquid at a gentle simmer keeps the sweetbreads from toughening.

“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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