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Isw'eetbreads Fricasseed White

A white sauce fricassee made with sweetbreads and veal gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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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 ↓

Isw'eetbreads Fricasseed White

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Blanch and slice the sweetbreads.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, mix flour and butter to thicken the veal gravy.

  2. Add cream, mushroom powder, white pepper, nutmeg, and grated lemon peel.

  3. Stew the mixture together for a few minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Simmer the sweetbreads in the sauce for 20 minutes.

  2. Remove from heat, add coarse sea salt and more lemon peel, and stir well.

  3. Serve hot.

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Provide the tender, delicate meat that forms the body of the dish.
Veal gravy
Supplies the savory liquid base that the sauce is built on.
Flour
Thickens the gravy into a smooth, cohesive sauce when cooked with butter.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour, and forms the roux with the flour.
Cream
Adds body and a silky, rounded texture to the sauce.
Mushroom powder
Adds earthy, savoury depth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer the sweetbreads in the sauce. Gentle simmering keeps the cream-based sauce smooth and prevents it from splitting, while cooking the sweetbreads through without toughening their delicate texture. Boiling vigorously can curdle the cream and make the meat firm and rubbery.

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.

“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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