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Salad

Macedoine Salad

A salad of shredded carrots and turnips mixed with cooked green vegetables and dressed with French or Filippini dressing or vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and cauliflower match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 286 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Macedoine Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Use a potato scoop to scoop out pieces from the carrots and turnips.

  2. Boil the scooped vegetables in salted water until tender.

  3. Drain the vegetables and let them cool.

Assemble and season

  1. Mix the cooled vegetables with any cooked green vegetables you have.

  2. Season with French dressing, Filippini dressing, or plain vinegar, salt, and pepper.

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. Turnip + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together286 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Asparagus + cauliflowertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together163 recipes

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

  4. Beans + asparagustop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together292 recipes

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

  5. Turnip + asparagustop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together328 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

Carrots
Hold their shape when cut and boiled, adding sweetness and colour to the salad.
Turnips
Firm, mild vegetable that keeps its shape after boiling and adds body to the salad.
Cooked green vegetables
Add colour, tender texture and mild flavour to the mixed salad.
French dressing
Adds acidity and fat that moisten the vegetables and carry seasoning through the salad.

The step that matters

Boil until tender, then cool fully before mixing. Undercooked carrots and turnips stay hard and gritty, while overcooked pieces turn mushy and break apart. Cooling the vegetables before dressing keeps the dressing from thinning or warming them unevenly.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, beans, asparagus, cauliflower, vinegar, pepper):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Peasthe original
  4. Chickpeafits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, beans, asparagus, cauliflower, vinegar, pepper. 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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