Name: Baked Sweetbreads
Ingredients: 2 large sweetbreads; thin slips of bacon; 2 tablespoons fresh butter; 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour; juice and grated yellow rind of 1 lemon; ⅓ cup good white wine; grated nutmeg to taste; mushroom catsup (optional); salad oil (optional)

Why it works: White wine and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,765 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity. The science ↓

Baked Sweetbreads

Ingredients

Directions

Blanch and parboil the sweetbreads.
Lard the sweetbreads with thin slips of bacon.
Place them in a shallow pan with a piece of fresh butter mixed with flour underneath each sweetbread.
Mix the lemon juice and grated rind with the white wine and pour into the pan.
Season with grated nutmeg or use mushroom catsup mixed with salad oil for sauce.

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.

White wine + mushroomtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,765 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).
Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together11,318 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,525 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).
Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,623 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Butter + white winetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,083 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, white wine, nutmeg, mushroom):

Lemonthe original
Figfits about as well
Plumfits about as well
Peachfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, white wine, nutmeg, mushroom. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.