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Salad

Suppeb Salad

A lettuce salad with boiled eggs, yolks, and a dressing of white sauce, vinegar, capers, gherkins, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 372 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Suppeb Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lettuce

  1. Clean the lettuces and cut them down the stalk.

  2. Break off the leaves, rinse them, and drain them.

  3. Cut the leaves into very fine strips.

  4. Mince the hard-boiled egg and mix the minced egg with the salad.

Make the dressing

  1. Rub the hard-boiled egg yolks through a fine sieve.

  2. Mix the sieved yolks with the cold white sauce, vinegar, capers, gherkins, pepper, and salt.

Dress and serve

  1. Pour the dressing over the salad.

  2. Sprinkle with chopped parsley.

  3. Serve.

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 + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together372 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Capers + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  4. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

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

  5. Lettuce + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Lettuces
Forms the bulk of the salad and provides its crisp, fresh leaf texture.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Pressed through a sieve, they make the dressing smooth and rich, adding body and fat.
Cold white sauce
Binds the sieved yolks into a creamy dressing that coats the leaves.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the rich dressing and balances its fat.
Capers
Add a sharp, briny flavour that cuts through the richness of the dressing.

The step that matters

Rubbing the yolks through a fine sieve. Yolks pressed through a fine sieve break into very small particles that blend smoothly into the white sauce. Unsieved or coarse yolks leave lumps and a grainy texture in the dressing.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sauce, vinegar, capers, pepper, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sauce, vinegar, capers, pepper, parsley. 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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