Name: Sweetbreads Plain
Ingredients: fresh sweetbreads; flour; oil or fat for frying; slices of lemon; chervil or parsley for garnish

Why it works: Lemon and chervil match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 358 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Sweetbreads Plain

Ingredients

Directions

Parboil the sweetbreads until just cooked, then slice them.
Dry the slices on a clean cloth and coat them lightly with flour.
Heat oil or fat in a pan and fry the sweetbread slices until they are a delicate brown.
Drain excess fat from the fried sweetbreads.
Garnish with slices of lemon and sprigs of chervil or parsley.

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 + cherviltop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together358 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Flour + cherviltop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together232 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together30,404 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).