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Sweet Bread, Liver and Heart

A sweet bread dish fried with salt pork and bread crumbs, served with a gravy of flour, water, spices, and optional wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and sage match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Sweet Bread, Liver and Heart

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweet bread

  1. Parboil the sweet bread and let it cool.

  2. Cut the sweet bread into 1-inch thick pieces.

  3. Season the pieces with salt, pepper, and sage.

  4. Dip the pieces in egg yolk and coat with bread crumbs.

  5. Fry the pieces until light brown.

Make the pan sauce

  1. Fry slices of salt pork until brown.

  2. Fry the sweet bread in the pork fat.

  3. Mix a little flour with water until smooth.

  4. Stir the mixture into the fat.

  5. Add spices and wine if desired.

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 + sagetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

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

  2. Sage + porktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,527 recipes

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

  3. Sage + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,115 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Bread + porktop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet bread
Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender inside and crisp outside when fried.
Egg yolk
Binds the bread crumb coating to the pieces so it adheres during frying.
Fine bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned coating on the outside of the pieces.
Salt pork
Renders fat for frying and adds savory flavor to the sweet bread.
Flour
Thickens the pan fat into a smooth, light sauce when mixed with water.

The step that matters

Fry the sweet bread in the pork fat. The pan must be hot enough to brown the coated pieces quickly; if the heat is too low, the crumb coating absorbs fat and turns greasy instead of crisp.

Swap the sage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, pepper, egg, pork, flour, wine):

  1. Thymefits about as well
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Marjoramfits about as well
  4. Sagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, pepper, egg, pork, flour, wine. 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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