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Sweetbreads and Mushrooms

A stew of sweetbreads and mushrooms cooked in water and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Sweetbreads and Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Trim off the ears from the sweetbreads and soak them in salt water for 1 hour.

  2. Wash the sweetbreads in cold water and boil until done.

  3. Once cold, cut the sweetbreads into small pieces.

Cook the mushrooms and sweetbreads

  1. Slice the mushrooms and boil them in ½ cup of water for 5 minutes.

  2. Add the sweetbreads to the mushrooms and boil for an additional 10 minutes.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In a pan, rub 1 tablespoon of flour into an egg-sized piece of butter until smooth.

  2. Stir in ½ cup of cream and pour this mixture into the mushrooms and sweetbreads.

  3. Season with salt and pepper, and let it boil for 5 minutes.

  4. Serve immediately in a hot dish.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mushroom + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,500 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Flour and butter 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
Provide the tender, meaty main body of the stew.
French button mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and soft texture to the stew.
Flour
Thickens the butter and cream into a smooth sauce.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and rich flavour, and helps the flour blend smoothly.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce.

The step that matters

Blending the flour into the butter. Rubbing the flour into the butter until smooth before adding cream prevents lumps, because flour clumps when added directly to liquid. Cooking the mixture gelatinises the starch so the sauce thickens evenly.

“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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