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Scalloped Sweetbreads

Sweetbreads cooked in a white sauce, coated with breadcrumbs, and fried until golden, served with peas or mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Scalloped Sweetbreads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook the sweetbreads

  1. Prepare the sweetbreads for cooking as instructed in previous pages.

  2. Stew the sweetbreads gently for about 1½ hours.

Make the sauce

  1. Make a stiff white sauce by melting butter, adding flour, and gradually stirring in stock.

  2. Season the sauce to taste and boil for about 10 minutes, stirring well.

  3. Remove the sauce from heat and add the egg yolk.

Coat and fry

  1. Coat the cutlets of sweetbreads with the sauce.

  2. Sprinkle the sweetbreads with breadcrumbs and let them cool.

  3. Brush the sweetbreads with egg white, sprinkle again with breadcrumbs, and fry in boiling fat until golden.

  4. Serve the sweetbreads with green peas or mushrooms in the center of the dish, arranged around.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Pepper + peastop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,331 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + peastop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,887 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour 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
Main protein, gently stewed until tender before coating and frying.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and helps form its base with the flour.
Flour
Thickens the butter and stock into a stiff white sauce that holds the coating.
Stock
Liquid that gelatinizes with the flour, giving the sauce body and savoury flavour.
Egg yolk
Added off the heat to enrich the sauce and add richness without scrambling.
Egg white
Brushed on so the second layer of breadcrumbs adheres and browns in the fat.

The step that matters

Remove the sauce from heat before adding the egg yolk. Egg yolk proteins coagulate at high heat, so adding it to a boiling sauce can scramble it into lumps and leave the coating grainy.

Swap the peas

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, egg. 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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