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To Dress Veal Sweetbreads

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Dress Veal Sweetbreads

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Parboil the sweetbreads, being careful not to overboil them.

  2. Divide and stew them in white gravy.

  3. Thicken and season the gravy with salt, mace, and white pepper.

  4. When ready, add a little hot cream.

  5. Alternatively, egg the parboiled sweetbreads, dip them in crumbs and herbs, and finish in a Dutch oven.

  6. Serve with melted butter and catsup.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  4. Veal + breadtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,056 recipes

    Shared aroma: cis-3-hexenol (green, grassy).

  5. Veal + macetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,761 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, mace, cream, bread, butter):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Sagefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, mace, cream, bread, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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