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Sweetbread Salad

A salad of boiled sweetbreads, cucumber, and walnut pieces served with boiled salad dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Cucumber and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 380 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Sweetbread Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Boil sweetbreads in salted and acidulated water for 20 minutes.

  2. Drain and plunge into cold water for 5 minutes.

  3. Drain and dry the sweetbreads, then cut into ¼ inch cubes.

Assemble and serve

  1. In a bowl, combine sweetbreads, cucumber, and walnut meats.

  2. Toss lightly with a fork and serve with Boiled Salad Dressing.

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. Cucumber + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together380 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Walnut + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,035 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Cucumber + meattop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together323 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

Sweetbreads
Provide the tender, rich main body of the salad.
Cucumber
Adds crisp texture and cool moisture against the rich sweetbreads.
English walnut meats
Add crunch and a nutty, slightly fatty flavor.

The step that matters

Boil the sweetbreads in salted, acidulated water. Simmering in acidulated water helps keep the sweetbreads pale and firm, while the salt seasons them from within. Boiling too hard or too long can toughen the delicate tissue and make it rubbery.

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (walnut, meat):

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, meat. 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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