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To Dress Palates and Sweetbreads

A stew of boiled palates and sweetbreads flavored with butter, flour, spices, wine, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 Dress Palates and Sweetbreads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the palates until the black skin can be easily peeled off.

  2. Parboil the sweetbreads with the palates.

  3. Skin and cut the palates into pieces.

  4. If the sweetbreads are large, cut them in half lengthwise.

  5. Dust the palates and sweetbreads with flour.

  6. Fry them in butter until light brown.

Stew and finish

  1. Stew them in the liquid they were boiled in, about 1½ cups.

  2. Brown a piece of butter with flour.

  3. Add the browned butter mixture, cayenne, salt, pepper, grated lemon peel, nutmeg, and white wine to the stew.

  4. Just before serving, stir in vinegar or lemon juice.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,083 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Palates
Provide the main meat, which becomes tender through boiling and stewing.
Sweetbreads
Add a rich, delicate texture that firms slightly when parboiled and fried.
Flour
Coats the meat and, browned in butter, thickens the stew sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and browning when frying and in the roux-style mixture.
White wine
Adds acidity and aroma that brighten the savoury stew.
Vinegar or lemon juice
Adds acidity at the end, sharpening flavour and balancing the richness.

The step that matters

Fry the dusted palates and sweetbreads until light brown. Flour and butter brown through the Maillard reaction, adding savoury flavour and a golden surface. Overcooking darkens the coating and can turn it bitter, so stop at light brown before stewing.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, pepper, lemon, white wine, vinegar):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, pepper, lemon, white wine, vinegar. 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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