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Salad

Sweetbread Salad

A salad of diced sweetbread, celery, lettuce, parsley, olives, hard‑boiled eggs, and salad dressing, garnished with lemon and egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Sweetbread Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbread

  1. Clean and parboil the sweetbread, then place it in cold water.

  2. Remove the fat and skin, drain, and chill in the refrigerator until thoroughly cold.

  3. Cut the sweetbread into dice.

Assemble and serve

  1. Add the diced sweetbread to the celery, lettuce, parsley, olives, and chopped whites of the eggs.

  2. Blend the mixture with 1 cup of salad dressing.

  3. Garnish with pieces of lemon, sliced olives, and the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs pressed through a tea sieve.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  3. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 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

Sweetbread
Provides the tender, meaty main body of the salad.
Hard-boiled eggs
Whites add soft texture to the mix; yolks give a crumbly garnish.
Salad dressing
Binds the ingredients together and adds moisture and richness.
Celery
Adds a crisp, crunchy texture against the soft sweetbread.
Olives
Contribute a salty, briny note that balances the rich dressing.

The step that matters

Chill the sweetbread until thoroughly cold before dicing. Sweetbread is soft and fatty; cooling it firms the tissue so it cuts into clean dice instead of crumbling, and keeps the salad cool and well set.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Spinachfits about as well
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Lettucethe original

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