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Dutch Sweetbreads

Dutch Sweetbreads are veal sweetbreads prepared with breadcrumbs, butter, and seasonings, then fried and simmered in stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Dutch Sweetbreads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Pass the meat and suet through a mincing machine twice.

  2. Soak the breadcrumbs in milk and squeeze them as dry as possible.

  3. Melt the butter in a pan, add the breadcrumbs, and cook until they form a paste, then remove from the stove.

  4. Add the minced meat, beaten egg, seasonings, and lemon rind, and shape into small sweetbreads.

Fry and simmer

  1. Dip the sweetbreads in egg, then in breadcrumbs, and fry in hot fat quickly.

  2. Place in a pan, half cover with stock, and simmer for about 20 minutes.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Dish up the sweetbreads, mix the flour with cold water, pour on the hot stock, let it boil, add seasoning and a little lemon juice, and pour over the sweetbreads.

  2. Garnish with curled bacon.

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

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

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Veal
Provides the main body and savoury flavour of the minced mixture.
Breadcrumbs
Soaked in milk and cooked in butter, they bind the mixture and give it a soft texture.
Egg
Binds the minced mixture and coats the sweetbreads so they hold together when fried.
Suet
Adds fat that keeps the minced meat moist and tender during cooking.
Stock
Gently cooks the sweetbreads and forms the base of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the hot stock into a smooth sauce.

The step that matters

Squeezing the breadcrumbs dry. Breadcrumbs soaked in milk hold a lot of liquid. Squeezing them dry keeps the mixture firm enough to shape, so the sweetbreads do not fall apart when fried or simmered.

“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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