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Sweetbreads Boiled or Fried

Sweetbreads boiled or fried, served plain or with white sauce, baked in a buttered dish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Sweetbreads Boiled or Fried

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Soak the sweetbreads in warm water for 1 hour.

  2. Cook the sweetbreads in boiling stock and simmer for 30 minutes.

Fry or serve the sweetbreads

  1. Serve the sweetbreads plainly or with white sauce.

  2. Brush the sweetbreads with egg.

  3. Roll the sweetbreads in crumbs.

  4. Fry the sweetbreads until brown.

Make the custard and bake

  1. Mix the arrowroot with cold milk.

  2. Boil the remaining milk with lemon rind.

  3. Strain the lemon milk onto the arrowroot mixture.

  4. Add sugar and salt to the mixture.

  5. Let the mixture cool.

  6. Stir in the egg yolk.

  7. Fold in the whisked egg white.

  8. Bake the mixture in a buttered dish at 350°F (175°C) for about 20 minutes.

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. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
The main ingredient, which becomes tender when soaked and simmered in stock.
Arrowroot
Thickens the milk mixture into a smooth, set base as it heats.
Milk
Provides the liquid and creamy body of the mixture.
Egg yolk
Enriches the mixture and helps it set into a custard when baked.
Egg white
Whisked and folded in to add lightness and help the mixture rise in the oven.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the custard mixture.

The step that matters

Fold in the whisked egg white. Folding gently keeps the air trapped in the whisked white. Stirring hard deflates it, so the baked mixture rises less and turns out denser.

Swap the arrowroot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, milk, lemon, egg, butter):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits about as well
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, milk, lemon, egg, butter. 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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