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Sweetbreads with Spinach

Sweetbreads with spinach, mushrooms, and brown sauce served over mashed potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and potato work together. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 646 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Sweetbreads with Spinach

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads and mushroom paste

  1. Simmer the sweetbreads in the white stock for 20 minutes.

  2. Let them cool and cut into neat pieces.

  3. Boil the mushrooms in the brown stock. Strain through a wire sieve.

  4. In a saucepan, combine the mushrooms with 3 ounces of butter and the yolks of 2 eggs, mixing into a paste.

  5. Season with salt and pepper and let cool.

  6. Spread the mushroom paste over the sweetbread pieces.

Coat and fry

  1. Dip in beaten egg. Coat with fine bread-crumbs.

  2. Fry the coated sweetbreads in hot butter until golden.

Prepare the spinach and serve

  1. Boil the spinach until tender. Squeeze dry.

  2. In a saucepan, melt 2 ounces of butter, add cream, salt, and pepper, then mix in the spinach.

  3. Serve the sweetbreads on a round of mashed potatoes. Place the spinach in the center. Drizzle with a brown sauce flavored with mushrooms.

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. Spinach + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together646 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Spinach + mushroomtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together778 recipes

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

  3. Spinach + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  5. Mushroom + buttertop 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 tender, delicate meat that forms the main body of the dish.
Butter
Enriches the mushroom paste and browns the coated sweetbreads in the pan.
Eggs
Bind the mushroom paste and hold the bread-crumb coating in place.
Mushrooms
Add earthy, savory flavor to the paste and the brown sauce.
Spinach
Adds a soft, moist green base enriched with butter and cream.

The step that matters

Fry the coated sweetbreads in hot butter until golden. If the butter is not hot enough, the crumb coating absorbs fat and turns greasy instead of crisping. Hot fat sets the crumbs quickly, forming a golden, crisp crust that seals in the moist interior.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (spinach, mushroom, butter, egg, cream, pepper, bread):

  1. Asparagusfits better
  2. Shallotfits about as well
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spinach, mushroom, butter, egg, cream, pepper, bread. 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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