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Sweetbreads Stewed

Stewed sweetbreads cooked with water, butter, salt, and flour, served hot on toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sweetbreads Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the sweetbreads and remove all bits of skin.

  2. Soak the sweetbreads in saltwater for one hour.

  3. Parboil the sweetbreads until half cooked.

  4. Cut the sweetbreads into small pieces.

Stew and serve

  1. Stew the pieces in a little water until tender.

  2. Add butter, salt, and flour.

  3. Bring the stew to a boil.

  4. Serve hot on toast.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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 a smooth mouthfeel to the stew.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a stew with body.

The step that matters

Parboil the sweetbreads until half cooked. Parboiling firms the outer tissue so the pieces hold together when cut and stewed. Cooking too long here leaves them tough or crumbly once they simmer again in the stew.

“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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