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Creamed Sweetbreads

Creamed Sweetbreads are veal sweetbreads cooked in a cream sauce with sherry, served in timbales, on toast, or in puff pastry shells.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Creamed Sweetbreads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Wash the veal sweetbreads thoroughly, removing pipes, membranes, and blood clots.

  2. Soak the sweetbreads in cold, salty water for 1 hour.

  3. Boil salted water with vinegar and cook the sweetbreads for 30 minutes.

  4. Drop the sweetbreads into cold water, then cut into small pieces.

Make and combine

  1. Prepare the cream sauce by combining milk, flour, butter, and salt in a saucepan and cooking until thickened.

  2. Strain the cream sauce and mix it with the sweetbreads.

  3. Heat the mixture in a double boiler until very hot.

  4. Add sherry and serve in timbales, on toast, or in puff pastry shells.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Vinegar + sherrytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together660 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Veal sweetbreads
Provide the tender, delicate meat that forms the body of the dish.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the cream sauce, giving it a smooth, creamy texture.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce that coats the sweetbreads.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the cream sauce and helps form its roux.
Sherry
Adds a light, aromatic sweetness and depth to the finished creamed mixture.

The step that matters

Washing and cooking the sweetbreads. Sweetbreads must be thoroughly cleaned of membranes, pipes, and clots, and then gently simmered with vinegar. Skipping cleaning leaves tough or bitter bits, while boiling too hard can toughen the delicate meat.

“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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