Skip to main content
Salad

Beaconsfield Salad

A salad of shredded cabbage lettuce, mustard cress, watercress, primrose blossoms, truffles, olives, lemon rings, capsicums, dressed with an egg yolk vinaigrette.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lettuce and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 307 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Beaconsfield Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the salad

  1. Finely shred the cabbage lettuce, mustard cress, primrose blossoms, and watercress.

  2. Mix with sliced truffles, olives, lemon rings, and capsicums.

  3. Arrange in a salad bowl, using some olives and truffles for decoration.

  4. Create a fringe of light cress around the edge and add small bunches of primrose flowers.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. For the sauce, whisk egg yolks with salt and cayenne, then gradually stir in oil until thick.

  2. Add champagne, spiced white wine vinegar, and the vinegar drops.

  3. Pour the sauce over the salad before serving, or serve it in a cruet.

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 + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together307 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lettuce + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,356 recipes

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

  3. Mustard + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together293 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Watercress + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together579 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Cabbage + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,645 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Emulsify with the oil to form a thick, creamy dressing.
Oil
Forms the body of the emulsified sauce with the egg yolks.
Dry champagne
Adds acidity and a light, lively flavour to the thinned sauce.
Spiced white wine vinegar
Provides sharp acidity and aromatic flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the oil to the egg yolks. Oil must be added slowly while whisking so the yolks can emulsify it. Adding it too fast can break the sauce, leaving it oily and thin instead of thick.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cabbage, lettuce, mustard, watercress, truffle, olive, capsicum):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, lettuce, mustard, watercress, truffle, olive, capsicum. 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.

You might also like

Cabbage DressingCabbage Dressing9 recipesChicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipes