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Stewed Sweet Breads

Stewed sweetbread is veal sweetbreads simmered in clear soup, finished with sherry, butter, pepper, and parsley, served with watercress.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 469 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Stewed Sweet Breads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Soak sweetbreads in saltwater to extract blood.

  2. Boil in slightly salted water for 20 minutes. Remove from water and chill on ice until cold.

  3. Trim off fat and stringy parts.

  4. Shape into small cakes.

Make the gravy

  1. Stew cakes in a small amount of clear soup for a few moments. Add sherry wine.

  2. Season with butter, pepper, and salt.

  3. Thicken gravy with crushed crackers or browned flour. Stir in parsley.

Serve

  1. Serve on a dish garnished with watercress. Pour gravy over.

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 + watercresstop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together469 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Flour + watercresstop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together340 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pepper + watercresstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together983 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  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 from veal
Provide the tender, delicate meat that forms the body of the dish.
Good clear soup
Supplies the liquid for stewing the cakes and forms the base of the gravy.
Sherry wine
Adds acidity and aroma to the gravy.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the gravy a smooth, rounded flavour.
Crackers or browned flour
Thickens the gravy so it clings to the cakes.

The step that matters

Chill the sweetbreads until cold before trimming and shaping. Cold sweetbreads firm up, so fat and membranes are easier to trim cleanly and the cakes hold their shape rather than falling apart when stewed.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, sherry, wine, butter, pepper, flour, watercress):

  1. Thymefits about as well
  2. Tarragonfits about as well
  3. Parsleythe original
  4. Capersfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, sherry, wine, butter, pepper, flour, watercress. 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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