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Chicken Salad with Mayonnaise Dressing

A chicken salad mixed with mayonnaise dressing, olive oil, celery, and garnished with capers, olives, and hard‑boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Olive and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,688 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Chicken Salad with Mayonnaise Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Remove skin and pull meat from the bones of the cooked chickens.

  2. Cut the chicken into pieces, not hashed.

  3. Mix the chicken with chopped celery.

Dress and serve

  1. Prepare 2 to 4 quarts of mayonnaise dressing using fine olive oil.

  2. If desired, shape the mixture in a mold and turn it out onto a platter.

  3. Spread the mayonnaise dressing over the chicken salad.

  4. Decorate with capers, olives, and quartered hard-boiled eggs.

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. Olive + caperstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,688 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Capers + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together405 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Chicken + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,888 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid hexyl ester (sweet, green).

  4. Olive + celerytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,667 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Chicken + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked chicken
Forms the bulk of the salad and provides its main texture and flavor.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds moisture and richness, binding the chicken and celery together.
Fine olive oil
Provides the fat base of the mayonnaise, contributing richness and flavor.
Celery
Adds crisp texture and a fresh, mild flavor to the chicken.

The step that matters

Cut the chicken into pieces, not hashed. Chopping chicken too finely releases more juices and breaks the meat into a paste-like texture. Larger pieces keep a firmer bite and let the dressing coat the meat evenly without making the salad mushy.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, meat, olive, capers, egg):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, meat, olive, capers, egg. 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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