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Salad

Mayonnaise De Ris De Veau

A salad of boiled veal sweetbreads mixed with mayonnaise, served on crisp lettuce with tarragon vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 and boil the sweetbreads for 20 minutes.

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

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

Prepare the salad

  1. Crisp the lettuce leaves.

  2. In a soup plate, rub the bottom with the cut side of half an onion.

  3. Add a little tarragon vinegar.

  4. Mix the Mayonnaise with the sweetbreads.

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

  6. For a stronger onion flavor, rub a small crust of bread with onion and mix it through the sweetbreads.

  7. Alternatively, use garlic instead of onion.

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 + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,370 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweetbreads
Form the tender, meaty body of the salad once cooked and diced.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and richness, binding the diced sweetbreads and moistening them.
Lettuce
Provides crisp leaves that contrast with the soft, rich sweetbread mixture.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds acidity and a sharp herbal note that cuts through the richness of the mayonnaise.

The step that matters

Boil the sweetbreads gently and cool them before dicing. Sweetbreads are delicate; a hard boil toughens and breaks up the protein. Cooling them fully before cutting keeps the dice firm and clean so they hold their shape in the mayonnaise rather than turning mushy.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tarragon, vinegar):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Lettucethe original
  4. Cucumberfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against tarragon, vinegar. 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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