Name: Veal Sweetbreads a LA Dauphine
Ingredients: sweetbreads; veal forcemeat; truffles; mushrooms; fat livers; artichoke bottoms; orange juice; coarse sea salt; black pepper

Why it works: Veal and liver match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 392 recipes. Both carry enoic acid, which smells butter, cheesy. The science ↓

Veal Sweetbreads a LA Dauphine

Ingredients

Directions

Lard the sweetbreads and cut a slit in one side of each, without cutting through.
Fill the slit with veal forcemeat.
Stew the sweetbreads as directed in the previous recipe.
Prepare a ragout with truffles, mushrooms, fat livers, artichoke bottoms cut into small rounds, and a few balls of forcemeat.
Add orange juice to the ragout.
Pour the ragout into a dish, place the sweetbreads on top, and serve hot.

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.

Veal + livertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together392 recipes

Shared aroma: enoic acid (butter, cheesy).
Truffle + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,900 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).
Mushroom + artichoketop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together447 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Orange + peppertop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,402 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).
Artichoke + peppertop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,170 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, truffle, mushroom, liver, artichoke, pepper):

Lemonfits better
Limefits better
Plumfits about as well
Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, truffle, mushroom, liver, artichoke, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.