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To Cook Champignons with Sweetbreads

A stew of champignons and sweetbreads cooked in clear soup with flour, butter, wine, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Cook Champignons with Sweetbreads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cook the sweetbreads thoroughly, removing all skin and gristle.

  2. Break the cooked sweetbreads into small pieces.

  3. Cut up the champignons.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the champignons and their liquid to a saucepan with the clear soup.

  2. Boil for 45 minutes.

  3. Add salt, pepper, mace, and the sweetbreads.

  4. Mix the butter with the flours. Stir the mixture into the sweetbreads until thickened.

  5. Add the wine.

Serve

  1. Serve very hot.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Wine + peppertop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,066 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 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

Sweetbreads
Provide the tender, rich meat that forms the body of the dish.
Champignons
Add earthy flavour and moisture through their cooking liquid.
White flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and helps bind the flour into a smooth roux.
Wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the butter-flour mixture into the sweetbreads. Flour thickens best when it is mixed with fat first and stirred in evenly, so it does not form lumps. Stirring while the liquid is hot lets the starch swell smoothly into a uniform sauce.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, wine, pepper. 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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