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Fried Sweet-breads

Fried sweetbreads are parboiled, seasoned, floured, and fried in lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 50,459 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fried Sweet-breads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Parboil the sweetbreads in salted water until done.

  2. Remove and dry them with a cloth.

  3. Cut the sweetbreads in half.

Fry

  1. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt, then flour them.

  2. Fry in hot lard until light brown.

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. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Main protein; parboiling firms them so they hold together during frying.
All-purpose flour
Forms a dry coating that browns in the hot fat and gives a crisp crust.
Lard
Frying fat that conducts heat evenly and drives browning of the flour coating.

The step that matters

Drying before flouring. Surface moisture turns to steam in hot fat and can make the flour coating soggy or cause it to splatter and fall off. Patting the parboiled sweetbreads dry lets the flour stick and crisp.

“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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