Name: Sweetbreads in Aspic Border
Ingredients: sweetbreads; chaud-froid sauce; aspic jelly; truffle; salad; mayonnaise sauce; lettuce; endive

Why it works: Lettuce and endive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 284 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Sweetbreads in Aspic Border

Ingredients

Directions

Blanch, cook, press, and trim the sweetbreads.
Cut the sweetbreads into neat slices and mask with chaud-froid sauce.
Decorate with truffle and coat lightly with aspic jelly.
Prepare a border mold with aspic jelly and arrange the sweetbread slices neatly around it.
Fill the center with salad moistened with mayonnaise.
Garnish the base of the dish with tufts of lettuce and endive.
Serve immediately.

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.

Lettuce + endivetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together284 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Truffle + endivetop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together29 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Sauce + endivetop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together129 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Sauce + lettucetop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,019 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Truffle + lettucetop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together99 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).