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To Fricasee Sweetbreads Brown

Fricassee of sweetbreads cooked in gravy with optional forcemeat balls and lemon garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

To Fricasee Sweetbreads Brown

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Scald the sweetbreads and let them cool.

  2. Remove all pipes and loose skin, then slice them.

  3. Dip the slices in beaten eggs, then coat with bread crumbs, pepper, and salt.

Fry and stew

  1. Fry the slices until they are a nice brown.

  2. Prepare gravy separately and stew the fried sweetbreads in it for 8 to 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Place the sweetbreads on a dish and pour the gravy over them.

  2. Add forcemeat balls if desired and garnish with lemon.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Bread + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

  4. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Bread + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 recipes

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

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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 tender main protein that is cooked and simmered in the gravy.
Eggs
Act as a binder so the bread crumbs adhere to the sweetbread slices.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned coating that gives texture when the slices are fried.
Gravy
Provides moisture and savory flavor as the fried sweetbreads finish stewing.

The step that matters

Fry the slices until nicely brown. Browning comes from the Maillard reaction on the breaded coating, which needs enough heat and dry surface to develop flavor and color. Overcrowding or low heat steams the crumbs instead, leaving them pale and soggy before the stew.

“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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