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Salad

Mayonnaise De Ris De Veau

A salad of boiled sweetbreads mixed with mayonnaise, served on lettuce and optionally flavored with onion and bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 425 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Mayonnaise De Ris De Veau

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Clean the sweetbreads.

  2. Boil the sweetbreads for 20 minutes.

  3. Remove all skin and fibers, then set aside to cool.

  4. Cut the cooled sweetbreads into small, even dice.

Prepare the lettuce and plate

  1. Crisp the lettuce by washing and drying it thoroughly.

  2. Rub the bottom of a soup plate with the cut side of half an onion.

  3. Add a little tarragon vinegar to the plate.

Assemble the salad

  1. Mix the mayonnaise with the diced sweetbreads.

  2. Rub a small crust of bread with onion. Mix the bread through the sweetbreads.

  3. Arrange the mixture in a mound in a salad bowl, surrounded by a row of lettuce leaves.

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 + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Lettuce + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,562 recipes

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

  4. Tarragon + oniontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,568 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Vinegar + oniontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,226 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Provide the main meaty texture and body of the salad.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and moisture, binding the diced sweetbreads into a creamy mixture.
Lettuce
Adds crisp texture and fresh contrast to the rich mixture.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds acidity and a sharp aromatic note that cuts the richness of the mayonnaise.

The step that matters

Remove all skin and fibers from the sweetbreads. Skin and fibrous membranes stay tough and chewy when cooked, so leftover pieces spoil the texture of the diced salad. Removing them after boiling, while the sweetbreads are still warm and easy to peel, gives a tender result.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, tarragon, vinegar, bread):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, tarragon, vinegar, bread. 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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