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Sweetbread Salad

A salad of boiled sweetbreads mixed with mayonnaise dressing, tarragon vinegar, onion, and lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,562 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Sweetbread Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Soak the sweetbreads in cold water for 1 hour.

  2. Remove all fat and skin with a silver knife.

  3. Place sweetbreads in a saucepan, cover with boiling water, and add salt.

  4. Simmer for 20 minutes.

  5. Transfer to cold water for 5 minutes to cool.

  6. Cut the sweetbreads into thin slices.

Dress and serve

  1. Rub a bowl with onion.

  2. Prepare ½ pint of mayonnaise dressing, adding tarragon vinegar for flavor.

  3. Place a thin slice of onion in the center of a salad bowl.

  4. Arrange lettuce leaves around it.

  5. Mix the sweetbreads with the dressing.

  6. Place in the center of the dish.

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. Onion + lettucetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,562 recipes

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

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 body of the salad.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds fat and creaminess, coating the sweetbreads and keeping them moist.
Tarragon vinegar (in the method)
Adds acidity and a sharp aromatic note that cuts through the richness of the dressing.
Onion
Contributes aroma and a faint sharp flavor to the bowl and dressing.

The step that matters

Simmering the sweetbreads. Sweetbreads are delicate. Gentle simmering cooks them through while keeping them tender; a hard boil toughens the proteins and makes them rubbery. Cooling them briefly in cold water firms them for clean slicing.

“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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