Why it works: Flour and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106,462 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓
Cutlets of Sweetbread
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Soak the sweetbreads in water for 6 hours, changing the water 3 or 4 times.
Boil the sweetbreads for 10 minutes.
Place them between two plates until cold, then cut into slices about ½ inch thick.
Bread and fry
Sprinkle the slices with coarse sea salt, flour, egg, and breadcrumbs.
Fry in boiling lard for about 5 minutes until light brown.
Serve
Serve in an entree dish with fillets of cucumber or peas in the center, and mushroom sauce, white Stamford sauce, or fine herbs sauce on the side.
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.
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Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together106,462 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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
- Main protein; soaking and boiling firm and whiten the meat before it is sliced and fried.
- Egg
- Binds the coating so the breadcrumbs stick to the slices during frying.
- Breadcrumbs
- Form a crisp, golden-brown crust when fried in hot fat.
- Flour
- Dries the surface of the slices so the egg and crumbs adhere evenly.
- Lard
- Frying fat that conducts heat and browns the coating while keeping it crisp.
The step that matters
Frying in boiling lard. The lard must be hot enough to crisp the crumb quickly. If it is too cool, the coating absorbs fat, turns greasy and may separate from the sweetbread before it browns.
“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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