Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Sweetbreads

A stew of sweetbreads cooked with onion, parsley, stock, thickened with flour and egg, finished with cream and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Stewed Sweetbreads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the sweetbreads and trim off any fat and refuse.

Stew and strain

  1. Stew the sweetbreads gently with the parboiled onion and a little parsley in white stock or water for 30 minutes.

  2. Remove the sweetbreads and strain the gravy.

Finish the sauce

  1. Return the gravy to the pan and thicken it with a little flour and the egg.

  2. Add cream and flavor with lemon juice.

  3. If desired, add chopped mushrooms and cook for an additional 15 minutes.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Parsley + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,132 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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 is the main component of the dish.
Flour
Thickens the gravy so it becomes a smooth, coating sauce.
Egg
Adds richness and further thickens the gravy as it heats.
Cream
Adds fat and body, giving the gravy a smooth, rounded texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream and gravy.
Chopped mushrooms
Add earthy flavor and a firmer texture to the stewed dish.

The step that matters

Thickening the gravy with egg. Egg proteins set when heated, so the egg must be stirred in gently off heat or over low heat. If the gravy is too hot, the egg can curdle and leave the sauce grainy instead of smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, flour, egg, cream, lemon, mushroom):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, flour, egg, cream, lemon, mushroom. 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

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes