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Sweet Bread Salad

A chilled salad of boiled sweet breads mixed with celery, walnuts, grapes, mayonnaise, olive oil, and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 852 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Sweet Bread Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Put sweet breads into boiling water with bay leaf and salt and simmer for about 3 hours.

  2. Drain and immerse in cold water until chilled.

Assemble the salad

  1. Combine chopped celery, English walnuts, and Malaga grapes with the sweet breads.

  2. Mix in mayonnaise and olive oil, then fold in a little whipped cream.

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 + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Walnut + olivetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,087 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Walnut + grapetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,427 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  4. Grape + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,110 recipes

    Shared aroma: cis-2-hexenal (grassy).

  5. Bread + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,091 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet breads
Provide the tender, delicate meat that forms the body of the salad.
Celery
Adds crisp texture that contrasts with the soft sweet breads.
English walnuts
Add crunch and a toasty, nutty flavor.
Malaga grapes
Add sweetness and juiciness that balance the rich dressing.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and creaminess that bind the salad together.
Whipped cream
Lightens the dressing, adding a silky, airy richness.

The step that matters

Simmering the sweet breads. Sweet breads must be simmered gently rather than boiled hard, because a vigorous boil toughens the proteins and makes the texture rubbery. Keeping the water at a gentle simmer lets the tissue turn tender while staying moist. Chilling them promptly in cold water then firms the texture so they can be cut cleanly.

Swap the grape

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Grapethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, celery, walnut, olive, 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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