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Creamed Sweetbreads

Creamed sweetbreads are sweetbreads cooked in a lemon‑infused milk sauce with egg yolks, butter, flour, and seasoned, then baked with breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Creamed Sweetbreads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Remove pipes and membranes from the sweetbreads.

  2. Cook sweetbreads in boiling salted water with 1 tablespoon lemon juice for 20 minutes.

  3. Plunge sweetbreads into cold water to harden.

  4. Cut sweetbreads into small pieces.

Make the sauce

  1. Heat 1 pint of milk in a saucepan.

  2. Beat the yolks of 3 eggs and add a little cold milk.

  3. Strain the egg mixture into the warm milk and cook over hot water until the sauce thickens.

  4. Add 1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon flour, salt, and pepper to taste, stirring constantly until smooth and thick.

  5. Pour the sauce over the sweetbreads.

Bake

  1. Place in a baking dish, shells, or paper cases.

  2. Cover with bread crumbs and bake until brown.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Milk + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Sweetbreads
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender when simmered and then cut into pieces.
Egg yolks
Thicken the milk into a smooth, rich sauce that sets as it cooks.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, which thickens with the egg yolks.
Flour
Thickens the sauce and gives it a smooth, stable body.
Butter
Adds richness and smoothness to the sauce.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned topping when baked.

The step that matters

Cooking the egg yolk sauce over hot water. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently; too much heat curdles them into a grainy texture. Cooking over hot water and stirring keeps the sauce smooth and thick.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, egg, butter, flour, pepper, bread):

  1. Figfits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Vanillafits about as well
  4. Raisinfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg, butter, flour, pepper, bread. 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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