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Salad

Beet Salad

A salad of boiled beets, onions, potatoes, eggs, watercress, and raw tart apples dressed with vinegar, oil, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,023 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Beet Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beets

  1. Boil the beets until tender, then skin and chill them on ice.

  2. Cut the beets into small pieces and mix with minced onions and cold potatoes.

Dress and serve

  1. In a bowl, combine vinegar, oil, salt, and pepper to make the dressing.

  2. Chop the hard boiled eggs and sprinkle them over the beet mixture.

  3. Arrange sprigs of watercress around the dish.

  4. Pour the dressing over the salad and serve with slices of raw tart apples.

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. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  2. Potato + watercresstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together170 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

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

  4. Onion + watercresstop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together533 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pepper + watercresstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together983 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Beets
Form the main body of the salad and provide earthy sweetness and colour.
Vinegar
Adds acidity to the dressing, balancing the sweetness of the beets.
Oil
Adds fat to the dressing, carrying flavour and giving it a smooth mouthfeel.
Hard boiled eggs
Add rich, firm texture and mild savoury flavour to the salad.
Raw tart apples
Add crisp texture and a sharp, fresh acidity against the soft beets.

The step that matters

Boil the beets until tender. Beets must be fully cooked through to become soft and sweet; undercooked beets stay firm and taste earthy. Chilling them after skinning firms the flesh so the cut pieces hold their shape in the salad.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, potato, vinegar, pepper, egg, watercress):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, potato, vinegar, pepper, egg, watercress. 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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