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Salad

Wax Bean Salad

A salad of cooked wax beans, celery, mayonnaise, and radish slices, dressed with French salad dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and chive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 261 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Wax Bean Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the beans

  1. Cook the wax beans until tender, then cool them.

  2. Mix the cooled beans with French dressing.

Assemble the salad

  1. Add cut celery, cream mayonnaise, and chives or onions.

  2. Pile the mixture in the center of a salad dish.

  3. Arrange thin slices of radishes around the base.

  4. Garnish the top with a radish cut to resemble a tulip.

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 + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together261 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beans + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together500 recipes

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

  3. Chive + radishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together30 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Lettuce + radishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together58 recipes

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

  5. Beans + chivetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together180 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

Wax beans
Provide the main body and tender bite of the salad.
Cut celery
Adds crisp crunch that contrasts with the softer beans.
Cream mayonnaise
Adds richness and moisture, binding the salad together.
French salad dressing
Seasons the cooled beans and adds tangy moisture.

The step that matters

Cool the beans before dressing them. Warm beans would absorb the dressing unevenly and can soften the mayonnaise into a greasy, loose mixture. Cooling them fully first keeps the dressing coating evenly and the salad texture firm.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, cream, lettuce, chive, radish):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Garlicfits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, cream, lettuce, chive, radish. 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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