Skip to main content
Salad

Sweet-bread Salad

A salad of boiled sweetbreads, celery, lettuce, mayonnaise, and capers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lettuce and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 372 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Sweet-bread Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sweetbreads

  1. Wash and trim the sweetbreads.

  2. Boil them for 20 minutes.

  3. Immediately drop them into cold water.

  4. Once cold, remove the veins and fat, then cut into dice.

Assemble and serve

  1. Combine with an equal quantity of chopped celery.

  2. Arrange the mixture on lettuce leaves.

  3. Cover with mayonnaise dressing and garnish with capers.

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 + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together372 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Celery + caperstop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together405 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Provide the tender, mild meat that forms the body of the salad.
Celery
Adds crisp texture and fresh contrast to the soft sweetbreads.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds fat and moisture, binding the salad and softening its flavour.

The step that matters

Drop the boiled sweetbreads into cold water. Chilling immediately after boiling stops the cooking, firms the meat so it can be diced cleanly, and makes the veins and fat easier to remove.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Dillfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, capers. 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.

You might also like

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes