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Salad

Okroschka De Gibier

A cold salad of roasted game meats, cucumbers, eggs, herbs, sour cream, and kvass.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Chervil and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 824 recipes mention both. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Okroschka De Gibier

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the salad

  1. Finely chop various roasted meats and place them in a bowl.

  2. Add diced cucumbers and hard-boiled eggs.

  3. Mix in chopped green onions, chervil, tarragon, and fennel.

  4. Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  5. Combine with sour cream and mix well.

Serve

  1. Pour in very cold kvass or kislischy and serve with clean ice.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Chervil + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together824 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Tarragon + fenneltop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together134 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

  3. Chervil + fenneltop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together67 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cucumber + cherviltop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together144 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Cucumber + tarragontop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together274 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Roasted meats
Provide the main body and savoury flavour of the salad.
Cucumbers
Add crisp texture and fresh, slightly sour bite.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and a soft, creamy texture to the salad.
Sour cream
Adds creaminess and a tangy richness that binds the salad together.
Kvass
Provides the tangy, lightly sour liquid base that thins the salad.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, cucumber, egg, chervil, tarragon, fennel, pepper):

  1. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  2. Lettucebetter flavor fit
  3. Chivebetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, cucumber, egg, chervil, tarragon, fennel, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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