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Ragout of Sweetbreads

A ragout made from sweetbreads, mushrooms, herbs, and a sauce of stock, flour, mutton juice, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Ragout of Sweetbreads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Cut the sweetbreads into small pieces.

  2. Fry in bacon fat with mushrooms and herbs.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

Make the gravy

  1. Add a little stock and thicken the gravy with flour.

  2. Stir in mutton juice and lemon juice before serving.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  4. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

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 ragout.
Bacon fat
Carries flavour and browns the sweetbreads and mushrooms during frying.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth, cohesive gravy.
Mutton juice
Adds meaty depth and savoury richness to the gravy.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich gravy and balances its fat.

The step that matters

Thicken the gravy with flour. Flour must be cooked into the liquid, or it stays lumpy and tastes raw. Whisking it smoothly into the stock before adding richer liquids gives an even, glossy gravy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Limefits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Cherryfits less well
  4. Figfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, pepper, nutmeg, flour, mutton. 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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