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Sweetbread Salad

A salad made from boiled sweetbreads, celery, onion, parsley, and mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Sweetbread Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Clean the sweetbreads.

  2. Parboil the sweetbreads. Soak the sweetbreads in cold water for 45 minutes.

  3. Cover the sweetbreads with fresh boiling water. Add bay leaf, parsley, salt, and onion. Simmer for 20 minutes.

  4. Transfer the sweetbreads to cold water.

Assemble the salad

  1. Slice the sweetbreads with a silver knife.

  2. Combine sliced sweetbreads with chopped celery. Season with salt and pepper.

  3. Rub a bowl with garlic or cut onion.

  4. Mix the sweetbread mixture and mayonnaise into the bowl.

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. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Celery + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Calf's heart sweetbreads
Provide the tender, delicate meat that forms the body of the salad.
Celery
Adds crisp texture and fresh crunch against the soft sweetbreads.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and richness, binding the salad and keeping it moist.

The step that matters

Simmer the sweetbreads gently. Sweetbreads are delicate; a hard boil toughens the proteins and makes them rubbery. Keeping the simmer gentle helps them stay tender and creamy.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, celery, pepper, clove. 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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