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Sweetbread Pie

A savory pie with sweetbreads, mushrooms, and bacon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and asparagus match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 137 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Sweetbread Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Parboil the sweetbreads and cut them into 2 or 3 pieces.

  2. Stew the sweetbreads in white stock with shallot, butter, flour, salt, white pepper, and mushrooms for 10-15 minutes.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place the mixture in a pie dish with asparagus tops, forcemeat balls, and hard-boiled yolks.

  2. Top the pie with slices of fat bacon, then cover the pie.

  3. Bake until the crust is done.

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. Shallot + asparagustop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together137 recipes

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

  2. Shallot + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

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

  3. Shallot + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mushroom + asparagustop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  5. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Provide the tender, rich meat that forms the body of the pie.
White stock
Supplies moisture and liquid that cooks the sweetbreads and forms the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour through the stew.
Flour
Thickens the stewing liquid into a cohesive, spoonable sauce.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Add richness and a creamy, crumbly texture to the filling.

The step that matters

Stew the sweetbreads. Stewing gently keeps the sweetbreads tender and lets the flour thicken the stock evenly. Boiling hard can toughen the meat and leave the sauce lumpy or thin.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (shallot, butter, flour, mushroom, asparagus, egg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against shallot, butter, flour, mushroom, asparagus, egg. 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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