Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Sweet-breads

Boiled sweetbread is a dish of cooked sweetbreads served with butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Boiled Sweet-breads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and dry the sweetbreads.

  2. Rub them with dry flour and a little coarse sea salt.

  3. Place them in a stewpan with enough water to prevent burning.

Cook and serve

  1. Cook until tender, then transfer to a dish.

  2. Pour rich drawn butter over the sweetbreads before serving.

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).

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
The main ingredient, whose tender texture is the goal of the cooking.
Dry flour
Coats the surface of the sweetbreads, helping them hold together during cooking.
Rich drawn butter
Adds fat and richness, poured over the sweetbreads to finish the dish.

The step that matters

Cook until tender. Sweetbreads need gentle, sustained cooking in enough water to keep them from scorching while the connective tissue softens. Too little water or too high heat can burn them before they are tender.

“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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes