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Sweet &Read, Liver and Heart

A dish of sweetbreads fried with egg yolk and breadcrumbs, served with a gravy of flour, water, spices, and optional wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and sage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Sweet &Read, Liver and Heart

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Parboil the sweetbreads and let them cool.

  2. Cut the sweetbreads into 1-inch thick pieces.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, and sage.

Coat and fry

  1. Dip in egg yolk and coat with bread crumbs.

  2. Fry until light brown.

  3. Alternatively, fry slices of salt pork until brown, then fry the sweetbreads in the pork fat.

Make the gravy

  1. To make gravy, mix a little flour with water until smooth, then stir into the fat.

  2. Add spices and wine if desired.

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. Pepper + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

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

  2. Sage + porktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,527 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Sage + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Bread + porktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Main protein; parboiling firms them so they can be cut and fried cleanly.
Egg yolk
Binds the bread crumbs to the sweetbreads so the coating stays on during frying.
Fine bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned coating when fried.
Salt pork
Its fat carries flavour and helps the sweetbreads brown in the pan.
Flour
Thickens the gravy when mixed with water and stirred into the fat.

The step that matters

Dip in egg yolk and coat with bread crumbs. The egg yolk is the glue for the crumb coating. If the pieces are not evenly coated or are wet, the crumbs fall off or brown unevenly during frying.

Swap the sage

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

  1. Thymefits about as well
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Marjoramfits about as well
  4. Sagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, egg, bread, pork, flour, wine. 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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