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Sweetbreads with Tomato Sauce

Sweetbreads simmered in a tomato and sherry sauce seasoned with allspice, sugar, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,395 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Sweetbreads with Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Boil the sweetbreads until thoroughly tender.

  2. Fry the sweetbreads in butter.

Make the sauce

  1. Strain the juice from the canned tomatoes through a fine sieve into a bowl.

  2. Add the strained tomato juice to the pan with the fried sweetbreads.

  3. Stir in the ground allspice, sugar, sherry, salt, and pepper.

  4. Thicken the sauce with flour until it reaches the consistency of rich cream.

Finish and serve

  1. Return the sweetbreads to the pan, basting them in the sauce for ten minutes.

  2. Serve 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. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Allspice + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,302 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Tomato + allspicetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together670 recipes

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

Butter and flour 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
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender when boiled and then browned in butter.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and browns the sweetbreads when they are fried.
Canned tomatoes
Provide the sauce base, adding acidity and a savory tomato flavor.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aroma to the sauce, deepening its flavor.
Flour
Thickens the tomato juice into a rich, creamy sauce.

The step that matters

Boil the sweetbreads until thoroughly tender. Sweetbreads are dense and tough if undercooked, and the boiling step is what softens their connective tissue before frying. Cooking them fully at this stage ensures the final dish has a tender texture rather than a chewy one.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sherry, allspice, sugar, pepper, flour. 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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