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Sweetbreads with Mushroom Sauce

A dish of sweetbreads fried and served in a mushroom sauce with truffles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and truffle are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,900 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Sweetbreads with Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Blanch sweetbreads in boiling water for 10 minutes, then cool in cold water.

  2. Tear sweetbreads into pieces with two forks, dip in beaten egg, and coat with breadcrumbs.

  3. Heat 2 ounces of butter in a frying pan and fry sweetbreads until golden brown.

Make the mushroom sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt 1 ounce of butter, stir in 1 ounce of flour until smooth.

  2. Add ½ pint of stock, mushroom juice, salt, and pepper; bring to a boil and simmer for 5 minutes without a lid.

  3. Add 20 button mushrooms, 1 tablespoon of truffles, and the fried sweetbreads; simmer for 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Scoop out the center of a rice case, pour in the sweetbreads, truffles, and gravy. 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. Mushroom + truffletop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,900 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  3. Butter + truffletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,209 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

  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
Main protein; blanching firms them so they hold their shape when torn and fried.
Butter
Fat for frying, browning the coated sweetbreads and enriching the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and stock into a smooth, cohesive sauce.
Stock
Liquid base of the sauce, adding savoury depth as it reduces and thickens.
Button mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and body to the sauce as they simmer.
Truffles
Provide a concentrated, aromatic flavour to the sauce and finished dish.

The step that matters

Frying the coated sweetbreads until golden brown. Breadcrumbs brown through the Maillard reaction only at sufficient heat with enough fat. Too low a heat soaks the coating with butter and leaves it pale and greasy, while too high burns it before the sweetbreads are heated through.

“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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