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Sweetbreads with Mushrooms

A dish of sweetbreads cooked with mushrooms, onions or potatoes, served over browned toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and mushroom 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 with Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Cook sweetbreads in enough water to cover them until tender.

Make the sauce

  1. In a pan, melt butter and fry the sliced onion or potato until golden, then remove them.

  2. Add flour to the butter and brown it.

  3. Pour in the liquor from boiling the sweetbreads and season well.

Finish and serve

  1. Add sliced sweetbreads and mushrooms, heating through.

  2. Serve the mixture over delicately browned 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 + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  2. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 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 dish.
Butter
Carries the frying of the onion or potato and browns the flour for flavour.
Flour
Browned in butter to thicken the liquid into a sauce.
French button mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and soft texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the flour in butter. Flour cooked in fat must be stirred until it turns a light golden brown. Undercooked flour tastes raw and pasty, while overbrowned flour turns bitter and dark. Browning also builds the nutty flavour the sauce depends on.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, mushroom):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, mushroom. 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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