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Salad

Sweetbread Salad

A salad of boiled sweetbreads, lettuce, mayonnaise dressing, egg whites, and optional celery.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,033 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Sweetbread Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Boil sweetbreads until soft, white, and mealy.

  2. Break them into small pieces with a silver fork.

Assemble the salad

  1. Place the pieces on lettuce leaves in a salad bowl.

  2. Beat the egg whites until light and add to the mayonnaise dressing.

  3. Pour the dressing over the sweetbreads.

  4. Add chopped celery if desired.

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. Lettuce + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Lettuce + eggtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Egg + celerytop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,334 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Form the main body of the salad, becoming soft and mealy when boiled.
Egg whites
Beaten until light, they add airiness to the mayonnaise dressing.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds moisture and richness, coating the sweetbread pieces.

Swap the celery

The recipe marks celery as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, egg):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, egg. 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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