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Soup, Sweetbread

Soup made from sweetbreads simmered in stock with herbs, celery, mace, lemon juice, pepper, salt, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Soup, Sweetbread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Boil the sweetbreads in water with a little salt for 5 minutes.

  2. Skin the sweetbreads and trim them.

Make the soup

  1. Gently boil them in white stock with the bouquet of herbs, celery or celery seed, and mace until tender.

  2. Pass them through a fine sieve or chop them finely.

  3. Remove the herbs.

  4. Add pepper, salt, lemon juice, and cream.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  3. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  4. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Celery + macetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,769 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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, delicate meat that forms the body of the soup.
White stock
Supplies the liquid base and carries the flavour of the herbs and mace.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Gently boil the sweetbreads in the stock. A vigorous boil toughens the proteins in the sweetbreads and can make the meat firm and grainy. A gentle simmer lets them become tender while the stock stays clear and flavourful.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (celery, lemon, pepper, cream):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, lemon, pepper, 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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