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Creamed Sweetbreads

Creamed Sweetbreads is a dish of lamb sweetbreads simmered in butter and lemon, served on toasted French rolls with Bechamel sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Creamed Sweetbreads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Blanch and trim the lambs' sweetbreads.

  2. In a pan, melt the butter and add the sweetbreads with the lemon juice.

  3. Cover with buttered paper and a lid, then cook gently for 30 minutes, basting continually.

Make the creamed sweetbreads

  1. Remove the sweetbreads and slice them into ½-inch thick pieces.

  2. Heat the sweetbreads in the creamy Bechamel sauce until hot.

Serve

  1. Toast and butter the French rolls, then cut them into ¼-inch thick slices.

  2. Place the sweetbreads on the toasted rolls.

  3. Garnish with finely chopped truffle or parsley, and serve.

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. Butter + truffletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,209 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Lamb + parsleytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,322 recipes

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

  4. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

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

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Lambs' sweetbreads
Provide the tender, delicate meat that forms the main body of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour while the sweetbreads cook gently.
Bechamel sauce
Creamy base that coats the sweetbreads and adds moisture and richness.
French rolls
Toasted and buttered, they give a crisp, absorbent base for the creamy topping.

The step that matters

Gentle cooking under cover. Cooking slowly with a lid and buttered paper, while basting, keeps the sweetbreads moist and tender. High heat would toughen the delicate meat and dry it out.

“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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