Skip to main content
Salad

Sorrel Salad

A salad of young sorrel leaves, seasoned with salt, pepper, and bacon, optionally dressed with vinaigrette.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Sorrel Salad

Why it works: Sorrel and pepper work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 419 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Sorrel Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick and wash the young leaves of sorrel, then drain them.

  2. Place the leaves in a salad bowl.

Assemble and serve

  1. Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper.

  2. Add fried bacon slices cut into fine strips.

  3. If desired, pour a little vinaigrette sauce over the salad just before 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.

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. Sorrel + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together419 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sorrel + saucetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together158 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Pepper + saucetop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,303 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Pepper and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,303 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Young leaves of sorrel
Form the main body of the salad, providing a bright, tangy, lemony flavour.
Fried bacon slices
Add salty, savoury fat and crisp texture against the tender leaves.
Vinaigrette sauce
Adds acidity and moisture to lightly coat the leaves.

Swap the sorrel

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Sorrelthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, sauce. 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.

You might also like

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes