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Salad

String Bean Salad

A salad of cold boiled string beans, sliced beets, hard‑boiled eggs, crisp lettuce, and mayonnaise dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 500 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

String Bean Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Assemble the salad

  1. Place the cold boiled string beans in the center of a flat dish.

  2. Surround the beans with a row of sliced cold boiled beets.

  3. Top each beet slice with a slice of hard-boiled egg.

  4. Garnish the salad with crisp lettuce leaves.

Serve

  1. Serve with mayonnaise dressing.

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

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

  2. Egg + lettucetop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Beans + eggtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,030 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

String beans
Form the base of the salad and provide its main bulk and mild texture.
Beets
Add a sweet, earthy flavor and a contrasting color around the beans.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add a soft, rich texture and mild savoriness on top of the beets.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds fat and creaminess that moistens the salad and balances its mild flavors.

Swap the beans

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

  1. Walnutfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Lentilsfits better
  4. Beansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, lettuce. 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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