Skip to main content
Dessert

Sweetbread or Chicken Mousse

A chilled mousse made from diced sweetbreads, gelatin, chicken broth, whipped cream, and served with greens and mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 579 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Sweetbread or Chicken Mousse

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mousse

  1. Cut cooked sweetbreads into dice to fill 1½ cups.

  2. Dissolve gelatine in cold chicken broth and add hot broth.

  3. Mix in sweetbreads, salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

  4. Stand the mixture in cold water until it begins to harden.

  5. Fold in whipped cream and pour into individual moulds to harden.

Serve

  1. Serve in nests of watercress or lettuce with mayonnaise on top and an olive as garnish.

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 + watercresstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together579 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + olivetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Watercress + olivetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together684 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Chicken + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,888 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid hexyl ester (sweet, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Gelatine
Sets the broth into a soft, sliceable mousse structure as it cools.
Sweetbreads
Provide the main savoury body and texture of the mousse.
Whipped cream
Adds lightness and a smooth, airy texture to the set mousse.
Chicken broth
Supplies the liquid that the gelatine sets, carrying the savoury flavour.

The step that matters

Stand the mixture in cold water until it begins to harden. Gelatine sets as it cools, so the mixture must thicken to a soft gel before folding in the whipped cream. Chilling too long makes it stiff and lumpy, while stopping too early leaves it too runny to hold its shape in the moulds.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, pepper, cream, watercress, olive):

  1. Avocadofits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Coconutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, pepper, cream, watercress, 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes