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Salad

Salad of Garlic and Herbs

A salad made by grinding garlic, parsley, rue, coriander seeds, salt, cheese, olive oil, and vinegar into a ball.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and olive are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25,665 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Salad of Garlic and Herbs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the skins from the garlic cloves and rinse them.

  2. In a mortar, combine the garlic, parsley, rue, and coriander seeds.

  3. Add coarse sea salt and cheese to the mixture.

Make and serve

  1. Grind the ingredients together smoothly with a pestle.

  2. Slowly add olive oil and vinegar while mixing.

  3. Form the mixture into a ball and serve.

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. Garlic + olivetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,665 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Garlic + coriandertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Parsley + coriandertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,062 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Garlic + parsleytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Coriander + olivetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,615 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Garlic
Provides sharp pungency that carries the flavour of the whole mixture.
Olive oil
Adds fat and richness, helping bind the ground ingredients into a smooth mixture.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the herbs and balances the richness of the oil.
Cheese
Adds salty, savoury body that helps the mixture hold together.

The step that matters

Slowly add olive oil and vinegar while mixing. Oil and vinegar do not mix on their own. Adding them slowly while grinding lets the oil disperse into fine droplets, forming a stable, smooth emulsion instead of separating.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (garlic, parsley, coriander, cheese, olive, vinegar):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Basilfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against garlic, parsley, coriander, cheese, olive, 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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