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Salad

Lettuce Salad

A salad of lettuce dressed with a mustard, butter, and vinegar sauce, garnished with sliced hard‑boiled egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,356 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Lettuce Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. Mash the yolks of the hard boiled eggs with salt and mustard until fine.

  2. Add the melted butter and mix thoroughly.

  3. Gradually add the vinegar and mix well.

Serve

  1. Pour the dressing over the lettuce.

  2. Slice the remaining hard boiled egg and place it on top as a garnish.

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. Mustard + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,356 recipes

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

  2. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Mustard + buttertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,003 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard boiled egg yolks
Mashed yolks form the creamy body of the dressing and help it emulsify.
Melted butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the dressing a smooth, silky texture.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the richness of the yolks and butter.
Lettuce
Forms the base of the salad that the dressing coats.

The step that matters

Gradually add the vinegar and mix well. Adding vinegar slowly while mixing helps the yolk and butter mixture emulsify into a smooth dressing instead of separating or turning thin and watery.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, mustard, butter, 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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