Name: Sweet-bread Salad
Ingredients: sweetbreads; crisp celery; mayonnaise dressing; capers (optional)

Why it works: Celery and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 405 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Sweet-bread Salad

Ingredients

sweetbreads
crisp celery
mayonnaise dressing
capers (optional)

Directions

Boil the sweetbreads until cooked, then cut them into small pieces.
Combine the sweetbreads with equal parts of crisp celery and mayonnaise dressing.
Add capers if desired.

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.

Celery + caperstop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together405 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads: Provide the tender, meaty main body of the salad.
Crisp celery: Adds crunch and a fresh, lightly watery texture against the soft sweetbreads.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds fat and creaminess, binding the salad and keeping it moist.

“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.