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Lamb's Sweetbreads

A lamb sweetbread stew with broth, spices, butter, flour, and a custard sauce, finished with asparagus tops.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Lamb's Sweetbreads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Blanch the sweetbreads and place them in cold water.

Make the stew

  1. In a stewpan, combine sweetbreads, broth, pepper, salt, button onions, and mace.

  2. Stir in butter and flour, then stew for 1 hour.

Finish with the egg sauce

  1. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks with cream, parsley, and nutmeg.

  2. Add boiled asparagus tops to the stew.

  3. Gradually stir in the egg mixture without boiling.

  4. Heat gently while stirring to prevent curdling.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

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

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

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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, delicate meat that forms the body of the dish.
Egg yolks
Thicken the sauce and give it a smooth, rich texture when gently heated.
Cream
Adds richness and moisture, softening the sauce and balancing the egg yolks.
Butter
Enriches the stew and, with flour, helps form a smooth base for the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the stew liquid so it coats the sweetbreads and vegetables.

The step that matters

Gradually stir in the egg mixture without boiling. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat; if the mixture boils or is added too quickly, the proteins scramble and the sauce curdles instead of turning smooth.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

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