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Salad

Plain Salad Dressing

A simple dressing made with lettuce, oil, vinegar, chives, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and chive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 261 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Plain Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lettuce

  1. Remove bruised and discolored leaves from the lettuce stalk.

  2. Wash muddy leaves in cold water, then drain and dry them thoroughly.

  3. Tear the clean leaves into pieces and place them in a salad bowl.

Dress the salad

  1. Drizzle the leaves with salad oil and toss gently with a wooden salad fork.

  2. Sprinkle with chopped chives or spring onion, salt, and pepper.

  3. Add a few drops of vinegar while stirring gently to avoid a sediment of dressing.

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 + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together261 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lettuce + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Chive + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,885 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. 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

Best salad oil
Coats the leaves with fat, carrying flavour and giving the dressing a smooth mouthfeel.
Good vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the richness of the oil.
Fresh lettuce leaves
Forms the body of the salad, and their crisp texture is what the dressing clings to.

The step that matters

Adding the vinegar. Oil and vinegar do not mix on their own, so adding vinegar by just a few drops while stirring gently lets it disperse into the oil. Adding it all at once can leave pools of sharp liquid at the bottom of the bowl instead of an even coating.

Swap the chive

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Cucumberfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Chivethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, pepper, 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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