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Sweetbreads of Veal a-LA-Dauphine

A veal sweetbread dish stuffed with seasoned forcemeat, simmered in a rich gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Thyme and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Sweetbreads of Veal a-LA-Dauphine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the stuffing

  1. Open the sweetbreads.

  2. Stuff them with forcemeat made from the fowl's flesh, bacon, and seasonings.

  3. Mix the forcemeat with the yolks of the eggs.

  4. Fill the sweetbreads with the mixture and fasten them with skewers.

Stew

  1. In a stewpan, layer bacon, seasoned with pepper, salt, mace, cloves, sweet herbs, and onion.

  2. Place thin slices of veal on top, followed by the stuffed sweetbreads.

  3. Cover and cook over low heat for 8-10 minutes.

  4. Add boiling water and simmer for 2 hours.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Remove the sweetbreads.

  2. Strain the gravy.

  3. Reduce the gravy to ½ pint by boiling.

  4. Return the sweetbreads to the pan.

  5. Stew for 3 minutes.

  6. Pour the gravy over the sweetbreads.

  7. Garnish with lemon.

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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Lemon + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Their tender, delicate meat is the main body of the dish, cooked gently until soft.
Eggs
The yolks bind the forcemeat so it holds together inside the sweetbreads.
Bacon
Its fat bastes the sweetbreads and flavours the stock and forcemeat as it cooks.
Fowl
Its flesh forms the forcemeat stuffing, giving body and a savoury filling.
Onion
Sliced onion in the base adds savoury sweetness and aroma to the stewing liquid.

The step that matters

Fill and fasten the sweetbreads. Overfilled or loosely skewered sweetbreads can burst or leak forcemeat during the long simmer, so the stuffing should be firm enough to hold and the skewers secure.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, meat, anchovy, lemon, thyme, parsley, pepper):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Rosemaryfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, meat, anchovy, lemon, thyme, parsley, pepper. 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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