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Chicken Salad

A chilled salad of diced chicken and celery dressed with vinegar, salt, pepper, and mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Chicken Salad

Why it works: Celery and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Chicken Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the chicken into 4-inch dice.

  2. Wash and cut the celery into dice, then chill it in a napkin on ice for 10-12 minutes.

Season and dress

  1. Season the chicken with vinegar, coarse sea salt, pepper, and oil (or omit oil and use cream or melted butter).

  2. Add the chilled celery to the seasoned chicken and mix in half of the dressing.

  3. Heap the mixture in a dish and add the remaining dressing on top.

Garnish and serve

  1. Garnish with tiny bleached celery leaves or small curly lettuce leaves.

  2. Optionally, add capers and a sliced hard boiled egg as garnish.

  3. In summer, serve on a tender lettuce leaf with a spoonful of dressing, very cold.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Celery + caperstop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together405 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + caperstop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,088 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Chicken + celerytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,375 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main body and protein of the salad.
Celery
Adds crisp texture that contrasts with the soft chicken.
Mayonnaise
Binds the salad and adds moisture and richness.

The step that matters

Chilling the celery. Cold celery stays crisp instead of going limp once dressed. Chilling it on ice firms its cell structure, so it keeps its crunch in the salad.

Swap the capers

The recipe marks capers as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, celery, vinegar, pepper, cream, egg):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Dillfits better
  4. Capersthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, celery, vinegar, pepper, cream, 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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