Skip to main content
Main

Fried Sweet-breads

Fried sweetbreads coated in breadcrumbs and served with a milk‑flour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Fried Sweet-breads

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Parboil the sweetbreads until tender.

  2. Cut them into even-sized pieces and sprinkle with salt and pepper.

  3. Dip the pieces in beaten egg, then coat with bread crumbs.

Fry and make the sauce

  1. Fry in hot lard until golden brown.

  2. If sautéing, remove excess lard, leaving about ½ teaspoon.

  3. Add 1 cup of milk thickened with a little flour to the pan.

  4. Cook while stirring constantly, seasoning with salt and pepper.

  5. Strain the sauce and pour it over the fried sweetbreads.

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. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Main protein; parboiling first makes them tender before frying.
Egg
Binds the bread crumb coating to the sweetbread pieces.
Bread crumbs
Forms a crisp, golden-brown crust when fried in lard.
Milk
Forms the base of the sauce, giving it a creamy texture.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a sauce as it cooks.

The step that matters

Cook the milk sauce while stirring constantly. Milk thickened with flour can scorch on the bottom or form lumps if left unstirred. Constant stirring keeps the starch dispersed so the sauce becomes smooth and evenly thick.

“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

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes