Skip to main content
Salad

Letttjce Salad

A salad of cabbage or cos lettuce with a dressing of oil, vinegar, mustard, and herbs, topped with hard‑boiled egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Tarragon and chervil match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 824 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Letttjce Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lettuce

  1. Wash the lettuce and dry it thoroughly.

  2. Break the leaves into bite-sized pieces.

Make the dressing

  1. In a bowl, combine the chopped cress, tarragon, chervil, and egg yolks.

  2. Add the salad oil, tarragon vinegar, and a little French mustard. Mix until smooth, then add the lettuce and toss gently.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately.

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. Tarragon + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together824 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Garden cress + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Tarragon + garden cresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together23 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Tarragon + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together901 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Garden cress + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together18 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard-boiled egg yolks
Mash into the dressing to add richness and a creamy, emulsified body.
Salad oil
Provides fat that coats the leaves and carries the flavour of the herbs.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the richness of the oil and yolks.
French mustard
Acts as an emulsifier that helps the oil and vinegar bind into a smooth dressing.

The step that matters

Mix until smooth before adding the lettuce. Whisking the yolks with the oil and vinegar gradually builds a stable emulsion. If the oil is added too fast or the mixture is not blended well, it splits and the dressing turns greasy and uneven on the leaves.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tarragon, vinegar, egg, garden cress, chervil, mustard):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tarragon, vinegar, egg, garden cress, chervil, mustard. 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 lettuce salad recipes

Cabbage 14French 9Dressing 7Plain 4Tomato 4Dutch 3 See all 145 →

You might also like

Cress SaladCress Salad10 recipesCabbage DressingCabbage Dressing9 recipesChicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipes