Skip to main content
Main

Creamed Sweetbreads

Sweetbreads simmered with aromatics, then finished in a butter‑flour‑milk sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Creamed Sweetbreads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Soak the sweetbreads in cold water for 1 hour.

  2. Remove all fat and skin from the sweetbreads.

  3. Cover the sweetbreads with boiling salted water.

  4. Add onion, bay leaf, parsley, and celery.

  5. Cover and simmer for 20 to 30 minutes.

  6. Drain the sweetbreads.

  7. Cool them in cold water.

  8. Pick the sweetbreads into tiny pieces.

  9. Discard the skin.

Make the cream sauce

  1. Melt 2 tablespoons of butter and 2 tablespoons of flour for each pint of sweetbreads until smooth.

  2. Add 1 cup of rich milk and stir constantly until it bubbles.

  3. Stir in ¼ teaspoon of salt and four shakes of white pepper.

Combine and serve

  1. Add the sweetbreads.

  2. Stir until hot.

  3. Serve immediately.

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 + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  3. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

  5. 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
Form the main body of the dish, giving it a tender, delicate texture once picked into pieces.
Butter
Forms the fat base with flour that begins the smooth, thickened sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and milk into a smooth white sauce that holds the sweetbreads.
Rich milk
Provides the liquid and creaminess that turns the roux into a pourable sauce.

The step that matters

Make the cream sauce smooth. Flour must be fully blended into the melted butter before milk is added, and milk must be stirred constantly as it heats. Otherwise lumps form and the sauce scorches or thickens unevenly.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, parsley, celery, butter, flour, milk):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, parsley, celery, butter, flour, milk. 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.

You might also like

Cream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesCelery StewCelery Stew25 recipesCelery CroquettesCelery Croquettes16 recipesCelery Cream SoupCelery Cream Soup15 recipes