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Salad

Celery a LA Cardinale

A celery salad dressed with a beet-based mayonnaise sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and mustard are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,169 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Celery a LA Cardinale

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the celery

  1. Choose white, tender stalks of celery, wash them well, and cut them into three-inch lengths.

  2. Arrange the celery in a pile in the middle of a salad bowl and cover with Cardinal Sauce.

  3. Decorate with young celery leaves for contrast and add two cold hard-boiled eggs, cut into quarters, if desired.

Make the Cardinal Sauce

  1. For Cardinal Sauce, wash the red beet without breaking the skin, boil it in salted water until tender, then peel and chop finely.

  2. Rub the beet through a sieve into a saucer.

  3. In a bowl, combine the yolk of one raw egg, salt, dry mustard, white pepper, juice of half a lemon, and cayenne pepper. Mix until smooth, then gradually add ½ cup of salad oil while stirring constantly.

  4. After using two-thirds of the oil, begin adding vinegar until you reach a total of ¼ cup.

  5. When the mayonnaise is thick and smooth, stir in enough beet to achieve a bright red color.

Finish and serve

  1. Spread the sauce thickly over the salad and keep it cool until 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. Celery + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  5. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Yolk emulsifies the oil into a thick, stable mayonnaise base for the sauce.
Salad oil
Forms the bulk of the emulsified sauce, giving it richness and smooth body.
Vinegar
Adds sharpness that balances the richness of the oil and mayonnaise.
Red beet
Colors the sauce bright red and adds a mild earthy sweetness.
Celery
Provides the crisp, fresh base that the sauce coats.

The step that matters

Adding the oil gradually while stirring constantly. Oil added too fast to the egg yolk cannot be absorbed, so the emulsion breaks and the mayonnaise turns thin and oily. Slow addition, with the vinegar added only after two-thirds of the oil, keeps the sauce thick and smooth.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (celery, egg, lemon, vinegar, mustard, pepper):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Dillfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, egg, lemon, vinegar, mustard, pepper. 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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