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Mayonnaise Salad

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and beetroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 678 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Mayonnaise Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare the lettuce and place it inside a serving dish.

  2. Make the mayonnaise sauce thick, almost like butter, and spread it over the salad.

  3. Sprinkle with lobster coral, chopped parsley, and capers for decoration.

  4. Add strips of red beetroot and, if using chicken, place slices of chicken shaped like a cock's comb alternately with similar pieces of red tongue around the base.

  5. Garnish with filleted anchovies and stoned olives for added flavor.

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 + beetroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together678 recipes

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

  2. Capers + beetroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together231 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lettuce + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together372 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Parsley + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Capers + olivetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,688 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, sauce, lobster, capers, beetroot, chicken, olive):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleythe original
  3. Garlicfits about as well
  4. Cuminfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, sauce, lobster, capers, beetroot, chicken, olive. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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