Skip to main content
Main

Sweetbreads Roasted

Roasted sweetbreads larded with bacon, served with a butter and mushroom ketchup sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sauce and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Sweetbreads Roasted

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Parboil the sweetbreads until tender.

  2. Let them cool, then lard with bacon.

Roast and make the sauce

  1. Roast in a Dutch oven until cooked through.

  2. For the sauce, melt butter and mix in mushroom ketchup.

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. Sauce + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Mushroom + ketchuptop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,225 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Sauce + mushroomtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,480 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Sweetbreads
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and delicate when parboiled and roasted.
Bacon
Adds fat and savory flavor that bastes the sweetbreads from within as they roast.
Butter
Provides fat and richness, giving the sauce a smooth, rounded body.
Mushroom ketchup
Adds deep savory, umami flavor to the sauce.

The step that matters

Parboil until just tender. Parboiling partly cooks the sweetbreads before roasting, so they firm up enough to lard without tearing and then finish cooking through without drying 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.

You might also like

Mushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes