Skip to main content
Salad

Tuna Fish

A salad of minced tuna, lettuce, olives, and French dressing, garnished with hard boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lettuce and olive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,580 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Tuna Fish

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a bowl, combine the minced tuna fish, shredded lettuce, and chopped olives.

  2. Mix in French dressing to taste.

  3. Garnish with sliced hard boiled eggs before serving.

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 + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

  2. Fish + olivetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together279 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Fish + lettucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together196 recipes

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

  4. Fish + eggtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,782 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Tuna fish
Provides the main protein and flaky body of the salad.
Shredded lettuce
Adds crisp texture and bulk to the salad.
Olives
Add salty, briny flavor that contrasts with the tuna.
French dressing
Adds moisture, fat and tangy sweetness that coat and bind the salad.

The step that matters

Mix in French dressing to taste. Salt and acid in dressing draw water out of lettuce, so it wilts and turns limp if dressed too early. Adding the dressing shortly before serving keeps the lettuce crisp and the flavor balanced.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Tomatofits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, olive, 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.

More tuna salad recipes

Avocado 3 See all 11 →

You might also like

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes