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Dessert

Sweetbread Pie

A savory pie filled with sweetbreads, mushrooms, shallot, and forcemeat, topped with bacon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and asparagus match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 137 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Sweetbread Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Parboil the sweetbreads and cut them into 2 or 3 pieces.

Make the filling

  1. Stew the sweetbreads in white stock with shallot, butter, salt, white pepper, and mushrooms for 10-15 minutes.

  2. Place the mixture in a pie dish with asparagus tops, forcemeat balls, and hard-boiled yolks.

  3. Top with slices of fat bacon, cover, and bake until the pastry is done.

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. Shallot + asparagustop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together137 recipes

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

  2. Shallot + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

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

  3. Shallot + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mushroom + asparagustop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together400 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Provide the main meaty filling, becoming tender and rich when parboiled and stewed.
Butter
Adds richness and body to the stock, helping thicken it when rolled in flour.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavor and a soft, juicy texture to the filling.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Add richness and a soft, creamy texture to the filling.
Fat bacon
Bastes the pie as it bakes, adding savory fat and browning on top.

The step that matters

Parboil the sweetbreads and cut them into 2 or 3 pieces. Sweetbreads must be parboiled before stewing so they firm up and can be cut cleanly. Cutting them while still raw makes them fall apart and release more liquid into the stew.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (shallot, butter, flour, mushroom, asparagus, egg):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against shallot, butter, flour, mushroom, asparagus, egg. 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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