Skip to main content
Main

Sweetbreads, White

A dish of parboiled sweetbread served in a creamy, spiced sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Sweetbreads, White

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbread

  1. Parboil the sweetbread, then place it in cold water to whiten.

  2. Dry it well on a clean cloth and slice it.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, thicken broth and milk with the onion, mace, flour, and butter.

  2. Stir until it boils, then strain it back into the saucepan.

  3. Add the sliced sweetbread and simmer gently for 20 minutes.

  4. Remove from heat and stir in the cream, salt, and lemon juice or grated lemon peel.

  5. Serve hot.

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

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  5. Onion + macetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

Flour and butter 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

Sweetbread
Provides the tender, delicate meat that forms the body of the dish.
Flour
Thickens the broth and milk into a smooth sauce as it cooks.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the flour mix smoothly into the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a silkier texture when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Simmer gently after adding the sweetbread. A hard boil can toughen the delicate sweetbread and break up the slices. Keeping the liquid at a gentle simmer keeps the meat tender and the sauce smooth.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, flour, butter, cream, lemon. 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.

More sweetbread recipes

Salad 73Croquettes 61Fried 37Fricassee 27Broiled 19Pie 19 See all 37 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes