Skip to main content
Main

Sweetbreads and Green-pea Sauce

Sweetbreads served with a sauce made from cooked peas and plain white sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Olive and peas are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,066 recipes. Both carry (z)-hex-3-en-1-ol, which smells freshly cut grass green and herbaceous notes. The science ↓

Sweetbreads and Green-pea Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the stewed sweetbreads.

  2. Dip the slices in beaten eggs, then coat with bread crumbs.

  3. Chill in the refrigerator for 2 hours.

Fry and serve

  1. Heat olive oil in a deep pan.

  2. Fry the sweetbreads until golden brown.

  3. For the sauce, add cooked peas to the plain white sauce and mix well.

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. Olive + peastop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,066 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-hex-3-en-1-ol (freshly cut grass green and herbaceous notes).

  2. Bread + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,091 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Bread + peastop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together804 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexyl acetate (fruity, apple).

  4. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

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

  5. Olive + saucetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,568 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the bread crumbs to the sweetbread slices so the coating holds during frying.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden coating that browns when fried.
Olive oil
Conducts heat in the pan and helps the coating brown and crisp.
Cooked peas
Give the sauce its green color and sweet, vegetal flavor.
Plain white sauce
Forms the creamy base of the green pea sauce, adding body and richness.

The step that matters

Chilling the coated sweetbreads. Chilling lets the egg and crumb coating set and firm up, so it is less likely to slide off or soak up oil when the slices are fried.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, bread, olive, sauce):

  1. Beansfits about as well
  2. Peasthe original
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Sesamefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, bread, olive, sauce. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesGreen PeasGreen Peas229 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes