Skip to main content
Main

Veal Sweetbreads a LA Creme

Veal sweetbreads cooked in a cream sauce with butter, flour, consomme, parsley, onion, ham, and optional mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Veal Sweetbreads a LA Creme

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Prepare the sweetbreads by blanching them and then stewing in good braise for 15 minutes.

  2. Once cool, trim and cut them into thin round slices.

Make the cream sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter and sauté the trimmings of mushrooms, parsley, onion, and ham until the butter begins to fry.

  2. Stir in the flour until well mixed, then gradually add the consomme, stirring until thin.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil, adding more consomme if it thickens too much.

  4. Once thickened to a béchamel‑like consistency, stir in the cream and strain it over the sweetbreads.

  5. Add mushrooms if available and season with salt.

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 + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Main protein; blanching and braising give them a firm, tender texture once sliced.
Butter
Fat that carries the aromatics and gives the sauce a rich, smooth flavour.
Flour
Thickens the butter and consommé into a béchamel-like sauce.
Consommé
Liquid base that gives the sauce savoury depth and thins the roux as it is added.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce with consommé. Consommé must be added gradually while stirring so the flour mixes in without lumps. Adding it too fast or skipping the stirring leaves lumps, and boiling too long makes the sauce too thick, which is why more consommé is added if it sets too firmly.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, ham, flour, cream, mushroom):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, ham, flour, cream, 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

Mushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes