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Salad

Anchovy Salad

Anchovy salad with beets, eggs, parsley, olive oil, vinegar, paprika, and lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,483 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Anchovy Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Bone and clean the anchovies.

  2. In a bowl, dress the anchovies with olive oil, pepper, salt, vinegar, and paprika.

  3. Add chopped hard-boiled eggs, parsley, and beets to the mixture.

  4. Serve the salad on lettuce leaves.

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. Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Olive + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,649 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Olive + vinegartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,297 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  5. Vinegar + lettucetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,370 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

Anchovies
Provide the salty, savoury backbone of the salad.
Olive oil
Adds fat and moisture, and carries the flavour of the dressing.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the fish and balances the oil.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and a soft, creamy texture to the mixture.
Beets
Add earthy sweetness and a deep colour.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Cucumberfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against olive, egg, vinegar, parsley. 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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