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Salad

Endive with Bacon

A salad of endive, onion, and crispy bacon dressed with vinegar or French dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Endive and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 214 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Endive with Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

Assemble

  1. Make a bed of endive on a serving plate.

  2. Top with finely sliced onion.

  3. Cut bacon into small pieces and fry slowly in a skillet until crispy.

  4. Scatter the cooked bacon over the onion and endive.

Dress and serve

  1. For dressing, pour off some bacon fat, add vinegar, and bring to a boil.

  2. Pour over the salad.

  3. Alternatively, use French dressing.

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. Endive + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together214 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Onion + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,226 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Endive + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together221 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Bacon
Frying releases fat for the dressing and its crisp pieces add savory crunch.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the warm bacon dressing and balances its richness.
Endive
Its crisp, slightly bitter leaves form the base of the salad and provide texture.
Onion
Adds a sharp, pungent bite that contrasts with the rich bacon fat.

The step that matters

Frying the bacon slowly until crispy. Slow frying renders the fat out gradually so the bacon crisps without burning, and the reserved fat carries flavor into the dressing. Rushing over high heat can scorch the bacon and leave bitter, burnt notes.

Swap the endive

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Cucumberfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Endivethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, vinegar. 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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