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Salad

Lettuce Dressing

A dressing made from boiled eggs, butter, mustard, pepper, salt, vinegar, sugar, and finely chopped lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,356 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Lettuce Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs

  1. Boil the eggs for 10 minutes, then place them in cold water for 1 minute.

  2. Peel the eggs, cut, and mash them finely.

  3. Mix the mashed eggs with melted butter or sweet oil, mustard, pepper, and salt.

Dress the lettuce

  1. Cut the lettuce finely and place it in a bowl.

  2. Pour vinegar over the lettuce and sprinkle with sugar to taste.

  3. Combine the prepared egg mixture with the lettuce and mix well.

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. Mustard + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,356 recipes

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

  2. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Mashed into the dressing, they give it body and a creamy, rich texture.
Melted butter or sweet oil
Adds fat and smoothness, carrying flavour and helping the egg mixture blend.
Prepared mustard
Adds sharp, savoury bite that balances the richness of the eggs and fat.
Vinegar
Brings acidity that gives the dressing its tang and brightens the lettuce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that rounds out the sharpness of the vinegar.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, butter, mustard, pepper, vinegar, sugar):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, mustard, pepper, vinegar, sugar. 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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