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Sweet Bread Salad

A salad made from boiled sweetbreads, celery, and cream mayonnaise, served on lettuce leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,033 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Sweet Bread Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the sweetbreads well and soak them in ice water for 1 hour.

  2. Transfer to a kettle, cover with water, and add salt; boil until tender, about 45 minutes.

  3. Remove from the kettle and place in very cold water for 5 minutes.

Assemble and serve

  1. Mix 1 cup of chopped celery with 1 cup of minced sweetbreads.

  2. Serve with cream mayonnaise and garnish with lettuce leaves.

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Celery + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,863 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  3. Cream + lettucetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,121 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

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.
Celery
Adds crisp texture that contrasts with the soft sweetbreads.
Cream mayonnaise
Adds richness and moisture, binding the salad together.

The step that matters

Boiling the sweetbreads until tender. Sweetbreads must be cooked gently in salted water until fully tender; undercooking leaves them tough and rubbery, while the salt seasons the meat as it cooks.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, cream. 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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