Skip to main content

Sweetbreads Fricasseed White

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Sweetbreads Fricasseed White

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Blanch and slice the sweetbreads.

  2. Thicken the veal gravy with flour and butter.

  3. Add cream, mushroom powder, white pepper, nutmeg, and grated lemon peel to the gravy.

  4. Stew these ingredients together briefly.

  5. Simmer the sweetbreads in the mixture for twenty minutes.

  6. When done, add salt and lemon peel, stir well, 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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, flour, butter, cream, mushroom, nutmeg, lemon):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

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

You might also like