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Sweetbread Cutlets

Sweetbread cutlets are boiled sweetbreads sliced, breaded, fried, and served with a sherry or Madeira gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Sweetbread Cutlets

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Boil the sweetbreads in water with a little coarse sea salt for 30 minutes.

  2. Once cold, cut them into equal slices.

Coat and fry

  1. Brush the slices with egg yolk and dip them in fine bread crumbs mixed with salt, Cayenne, and grated lemon rind.

  2. Fry the slices until they are a light brown.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Arrange the cutlets in a dish, placing them high in the center.

  2. Make a gravy in the pan by thickening with flour and adding sherry or Madeira just before serving.

  3. If desired, trim slices of cold boiled tongue to match the sweetbread cutlets and dress them similarly.

  4. Serve each cutlet on a slice of tongue or substitute with fried bread.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  3. Bread + sherrytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together682 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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; boiling firms them so they can be sliced neatly and hold their shape.
Egg yolk
Acts as a binder so the bread crumbs stick to the slices.
Fine bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating when fried.
Flour
Thickens the pan juices into a smooth gravy.
Sherry or madeira
Adds wine-based sweetness and aroma to the gravy.

The step that matters

Fry the slices until light brown. Frying over heat that is too high browns the crumb coating before the inside is heated through, while too low leaves it greasy and pale. Light, even browning gives a crisp crust and a warm centre.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, bread, pepper, flour, sherry):

  1. Figfits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Plumfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, bread, pepper, flour, sherry. 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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