Name: Sweetbread and Tongue Cutlets
Ingredients: sweetbreads; cooked tongue; thick white sauce; pale aspic; truffle or pickled walnut; cress or chervil

Why it works: Sauce and chervil work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 262 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Sweetbread and Tongue Cutlets

Ingredients

Directions

Slice the cooked tongue and sweetbreads thinly.
Dip the slices in thick white sauce and layer them in four layers, starting with sweetbread and ending with tongue, sauce side down.
Coat the top layer with pale aspic.
Place a star cut from truffle or pickled walnut in the center.
Garnish with tiny shreds of cress or chervil.

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.

Sauce + cherviltop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together262 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Truffle + cherviltop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together78 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).
Sauce + truffletop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,490 recipes