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Sweetbreads A-LA-daub

Sweetbreads a la Daub is sweetbreads cooked with bacon, lemon peel, pickled cucumbers, veal gravy, and garnished with celery and herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Sweetbreads A-LA-daub

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Boil the sweetbreads for 5 minutes.

  2. Remove and let them cool.

  3. Lard the sweetbreads with bacon pieces down the middle and on each side.

  4. Add lemon peel and finely chopped pickled cucumbers on the sides.

Stew and serve

  1. Place in a stewpan with veal gravy, lemon juice, and browning.

  2. Stew gently for 15 minutes.

  3. Thicken with flour and butter just before serving.

  4. Dish up and pour gravy over them.

  5. Garnish with boiled celery and barberries or parsley.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + celerytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  4. Cucumber + parsleytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,564 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Cucumber + celerytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,745 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Provide the tender main protein that is braised and absorbs the gravy's flavour.
Bacon
Adds fat and savoury flavour as it melts into the sweetbreads during stewing.
Veal gravy
Forms the savoury liquid that the sweetbreads stew in and the sauce served with them.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth gravy with butter.
Butter
Enriches the gravy with fat and gives it a glossy, rounded texture.
Pickled cucumbers
Add sharp acidity that balances the rich gravy and fatty meat.

The step that matters

Thicken with flour and butter just before serving. Flour thickens liquid by swelling its starch when heated. Adding it at the end, and not letting the gravy boil hard afterward, keeps the sauce smooth and prevents lumps or a dull, pasty texture.

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, veal, flour, butter, celery, parsley):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, veal, flour, butter, celery, parsley. 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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