Name: Creamed Sweetbreads
Ingredients: 1 pair sweetbreads; 1 tablespoon lemon juice; 1 tablespoon flour; 1 tablespoon butter; ¼ teaspoon salt; a few grains of pepper; 1 cup milk; slices of toast; parsley

Why it works: Lemon and parsley 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 ↓

Creamed Sweetbreads

Ingredients

Directions

Soak sweetbreads in cold water for 1 hour.
Boil sweetbreads in water with lemon juice for 20 minutes.
Let them cool, then remove membranes and pipes, and cut into dice.
Reheat the cream sauce, adding parsley and sweetbreads.
Serve on slices of toast.

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.

Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together81,283 recipes

Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).
Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, flour, butter, pepper, milk):

Parsleythe original
Cardamomfits about as well
Cinnamonfits about as well
Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, flour, butter, pepper, milk. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.