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Salad

Sweetbread-and-Cucumber Salad

A salad of cabbage lettuce topped with cubed sweetbreads, diced cucumber, French dressing, and jelly mayonnaise stars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and cucumber match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,409 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Sweetbread-and-Cucumber Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Arrange the leaves of the cabbage lettuce on a serving dish without destroying its shape.

  2. Cook the sweetbreads in salted, acidulated water for 20 minutes, then cool and cut into small cubes.

  3. Marinate the sweetbreads and chill the diced cucumber in ice water, then dry on a cloth.

Assemble and serve

  1. Drain the French dressing from the sweetbreads and scatter them with the cucumber over the lettuce.

  2. Press the jelly mayonnaise through a pastry bag with a small tube to create little stars throughout the lettuce.

  3. Serve immediately.

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 + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

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

  2. Cabbage + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together622 recipes

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

  3. Cabbage + cucumbertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together722 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
Supply the main protein, with a soft, tender, rich bite.
Cucumber
Adds cool, crisp crunch and freshness that contrasts the rich sweetbreads.
Firm jelly mayonnaise
Adds fat and richness, and its firmness lets it hold piped star shapes.
Cabbage lettuce
Forms the crisp leafy base that holds the other ingredients.

The step that matters

Piping the jelly mayonnaise. Mayonnaise must be firm and cold to hold a star shape. Soft or warm mayonnaise is mostly liquid oil and emulsion, so it spreads and loses its form.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, cucumber):

  1. Beetrootfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, cucumber. 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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