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Sweetbread Salad

A chilled salad of diced sweetbreads, celery, and mayonnaise served on lettuce and garnished with olives.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Sweetbread Salad

6 portions

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and blanch the sweetbreads until tender.

  2. Dice the sweetbreads and marinate with lemon juice, oil, salt, and pepper.

  3. Chill the mixture on ice for at least 1 hour.

Assemble and serve

  1. Add diced celery to the sweetbreads and mix in enough mayonnaise to moisten.

  2. Arrange the mixture in 6 portions on a bed of lettuce leaves.

  3. Top each portion with a teaspoon of dressing and garnish with spiral-cut olives.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Lemon + celerytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  3. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Lettuce + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Provide the tender, mild meat that forms the body of the salad.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and seasons the sweetbreads during marinating.
Diced celery
Adds crisp texture that contrasts with the soft sweetbreads.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and moisture, binding the salad and keeping it creamy.

The step that matters

Chilling the mixture on ice. Chilling firms the fat and lets the flavours settle before the mayonnaise is added, so the salad stays cool and holds its shape rather than turning greasy or loose.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, pepper, celery, olive):

  1. Tomatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, pepper, celery, olive. 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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