Skip to main content
Main

Sweet-bread Salad

A salad of sliced sweetbreads, onion, lettuce, and mayonnaise dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,562 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Sweet-bread Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Clean the sweetbreads.

  2. Parboil the sweetbreads.

  3. Blanch the sweetbreads in cold water for 30 minutes.

  4. Remove the fat from the sweetbreads.

  5. Thin the skin of the sweetbreads.

  6. Slice the sweetbreads thinly with a silver knife.

  7. Keep the slices in a cold place until ready to serve.

Assemble and serve

  1. Place the onion slice in the bottom of a salad bowl.

  2. Arrange the lettuce leaves around the onion slice.

  3. Top the salad with the sweetbread slices.

  4. Cover the salad with mayonnaise dressing before serving.

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. Onion + lettucetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,562 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Provide the tender, delicate meat that forms the main body of the salad.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds fat and richness, moistening the sliced sweetbreads and lettuce.
Crisp lettuce leaves
Supply a crisp, cool base that contrasts with the soft sweetbread slices.

The step that matters

Blanch the sweetbreads in cold water for 30 minutes. Soaking in cold water draws out blood and impurities, which keeps the sweetbreads pale and mild in flavour. Skipping or shortening this soak can leave them tasting harsh and looking grey after cooking.

“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

Creamy Lettuce SoupCreamy Lettuce Soup8 recipesLettuce SoupLettuce Soup8 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes