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Another Sweetbread Pie

A savory pie filled with sweetbreads, mushrooms, asparagus, forcemeat balls, and bacon, baked in pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and asparagus match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 137 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Another Sweetbread Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Parboil the sweetbreads, then cut them into 2 or 3 pieces.

  2. Stew the pieces in white stock with chopped shallot, butter, salt, white pepper, and mushrooms for 10 to 15 minutes.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place the mixture in a pie dish, adding asparagus tops, forcemeat balls, hard-boiled yolks, and bacon slices on top.

  2. Cover the dish and bake until the pastry is cooked through.

  3. Alternatively, you can place the filling in a vol-au-vent and serve on a napkin, or bake it in a pate.

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. Shallot + asparagustop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together137 recipes

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

  2. Shallot + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

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

  3. Shallot + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mushroom + asparagustop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Provide the tender, meaty body of the pie filling after parboiling and stewing.
White stock
Adds moisture and savoury flavour as the filling stews.
Butter
Rolled in flour, it thickens the stewing liquid and adds richness.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and moisture to the filling.
Hard-boiled yolks of eggs
Add richness and a creamy texture to the filling.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against shallot, butter, flour, mushroom, asparagus, 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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