Skip to main content
Main

Sheep's Brains with Black Butter

Sheep's brains cooked with vinegar, bouquet garni, parsley, carrot, cloves, and served with black butter and fried parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Sheep's Brains with Black Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the brains in tepid water and remove the outer skin.

  2. Soak the brains in cold water for 1 hour.

Cook and serve

  1. Place the brains in a saucepan and cover with water.

  2. Add vinegar, bouquet garni, parsley, carrot slices, and cloves.

  3. Cook until tender, then serve with black butter sauce and fried parsley.

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 + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Parsley + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Vinegar + clovetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,386 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sheep's brains
Form the main body of the dish, becoming soft and delicate when cooked gently.
Vinegar
Acidity that helps keep the brains pale and firm during simmering.
Black butter
Browned butter sauce that adds nutty, rich flavour and fat to the dish.

The step that matters

Cook until tender. Brains are delicate and can turn rubbery or fall apart if boiled hard. Gentle, steady simmering in acidified water sets the texture slowly and keeps them intact.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, parsley, carrot, butter):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Dillfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, parsley, carrot, butter. 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.

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes