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Salad

Salads

A lettuce salad dressed with an oil, white wine, and egg mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and white wine work together. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Salads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the lettuce in ice water, break it apart, and drain it on a fine sieve or cheesecloth.

  2. Mix the oil and white wine thoroughly for the dressing.

Make the dressing

  1. For boiled dressings, stir constantly while heating until smooth.

  2. Add eggs when the mixture is warm, stirring until it reaches a boiling heat.

Serve

  1. Serve the salad cold, ensuring it is piquant and fragrant.

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 + white winetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Lettuce + eggtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. White wine + eggtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Lettuce
Forms the crisp, leafy base of the salad and carries the dressing.
Oil
Provides fat and a smooth, rich mouthfeel to the dressing.
White wine
Adds acidity that gives the dressing a piquant, bright flavour.
Eggs
Emulsifies and thickens the dressing as its proteins set with gentle heat.

The step that matters

Stirring the egg dressing while it heats. Egg proteins set when heated, so if the mixture heats unevenly or is not stirred constantly, it can curdle or turn lumpy instead of smooth. Gentle, constant stirring keeps the proteins distributed and the emulsion stable.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (white wine, egg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against white wine, egg. 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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