Skip to main content
Main

Cutlets of Sweetbreads

Breaded and fried sweetbread cutlets served with vegetables.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bread and peas work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 804 recipes. Both carry hexyl acetate, which smells fruity, apple. The science ↓

Cutlets of Sweetbreads

Oven, in the book's wordsA rather cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Soak the sweetbreads in warm salted water for 2 hours.

  2. Parboil the sweetbreads.

  3. Trim the sweetbreads.

  4. Simmer the sweetbreads for 10 minutes.

  5. Press the sweetbreads between two plates until cold.

  6. Cut the sweetbreads into ½ inch thick slices.

Bread and fry

  1. Dry the slices in flour.

  2. Dip the slices in egg.

  3. Coat the slices with bread crumbs.

  4. Fry the breaded sweetbreads in hot fat until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve around a center of vegetables.

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. Bread + peastop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together804 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexyl acetate (fruity, apple).

  2. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + peastop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,837 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + peastop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,065 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-octenal (fatty, 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
Form the main body of the cutlets, becoming tender when simmered and pressed.
Egg
Binds the flour and bread crumbs so the coating adheres to the slices.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp outer coating that browns during frying.
Flour
Gives the egg a dry surface to cling to, helping the crumbs stick.
Fat
Conducts heat to brown the coating and give it a golden, crisp crust.

The step that matters

Press the sweetbreads until cold. Pressing while cooling squeezes out moisture and firms the meat, so the slices hold their shape and the coating stays crisp when fried.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, egg, bread):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Lentilsfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, egg, bread. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesGreen PeasGreen Peas229 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes