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Sweetbread and Palate Pie

A savory pie filled with sweetbreads, palates, and a seasoned gravy, topped with puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Sweetbread and Palate Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meats

  1. Scald the sweetbreads.

  2. Let them cool completely.

  3. Fry the sweetbreads until golden brown.

  4. Boil the palates until tender.

  5. Skin the palates.

  6. Cut the palates into square pieces.

Make the filling

  1. Brown a bit of butter with flour.

  2. Add 1 pint of gravy seasoned with spices and salt.

  3. Add the sweetbreads and palates to the gravy.

  4. Let them stew until nearly ready to eat.

  5. Place the mixture into a pie dish.

  6. Break the yolks of 2 hard-boiled eggs into the sauce, then mix well.

Bake and serve

  1. Cover the pie with rich puff pastry.

  2. Bake until the pastry is golden brown.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. 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
Provide the tender, rich meat that forms the body of the filling.
Palates
Add chewy, gelatinous texture to the filling after boiling until tender.
Butter
Browned with flour to start a nutty, flavourful roux for the gravy.
Flour
Browned in butter to form a roux that thickens the gravy.
Hard-boiled eggs
Yolks are broken into the sauce, enriching its colour, flavour and body.
Rich puff pastry
Forms the flaky, golden crust that encloses the filling.

The step that matters

Let the sweetbreads cool completely before frying. Sweetbreads that are still warm from scalding are fragile and may break apart or fry unevenly. Cooling firms the surface so they brown well and hold their shape in the filling.

“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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