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Veal Sweetbreads a LA Creme

A veal sweetbread dish simmered in a béchamel-like sauce with mushrooms, parsley, onion, ham, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Veal Sweetbreads a LA Creme

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sauce base

  1. Prepare the sweetbreads as directed in the previous recipe.

  2. Cut the sweetbreads into round slices.

  3. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  4. Add the mushrooms, parsley, onion, and ham to the butter.

  5. Cook until the butter begins to fry.

Make the cream sauce

  1. Stir in the flour until well mixed.

  2. Gradually add the consommé, stirring until the mixture is thin.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  4. If the sauce thickens too much, add more consommé to thin it out.

  5. Let it boil down until thick like béchamel sauce.

  6. Stir in the cream.

  7. Let it thicken to a béchamel consistency.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the sauce through a fine sieve over the sweetbreads.

  2. Add more mushrooms if desired.

  3. Season with salt and a few drops of lemon juice before serving.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

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

  4. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Mushroom + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Provide the tender, delicate meat that the sauce coats and is served with.
Butter
Carries the aromatics and gives the base a rich, fatty flavour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by absorbing liquid as it cooks with the butter.
Consommé
Forms the thin liquid body of the sauce, which reduces to a silky consistency.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture as the sauce thickens.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and savoury depth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce to béchamel consistency. Flour needs to cook long enough to lose its raw taste and thicken properly, while the sauce must be kept thin enough to strain. Boiling too hard or too long can make it gluey or over-reduced, and adding cream at the wrong point can cause it to split or lose its smoothness.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Avocadofits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Limefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, parsley, onion, ham, butter, flour, cream. 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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