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Game Salad

A salad of cold roast game meat, lettuce, hard‑boiled eggs, and aspic jelly, dressed with oil, vinegar, lemon, and mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Tarragon and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 425 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Game Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Marinate

  1. Combine the cold roast game meat with pepper and coarse sea salt in a deep dish.

  2. Pour Lucca oil, tarragon vinegar, and lemon juice over the mixture.

  3. Add the bay leaf and lemon slices.

  4. Let the mixture marinate for a few hours, turning occasionally.

Assemble and garnish

  1. Shred the lettuce leaves and place some at the bottom of a salad bowl.

  2. Layer the marinated meat on top of the lettuce.

  3. Finish with a final layer of meat. Arrange the last layer neatly. Smooth it out.

  4. Garnish the top with slices of hard-boiled eggs.

  5. Pour mayonnaise over the salad.

  6. Garnish with curled celery and aspic jelly.

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 + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Tarragon + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,137 recipes

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

  3. Tarragon + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together456 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + celerytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cold roast game meat
Forms the main body of the salad and absorbs flavour from the marinade.
Lucca oil
Carries flavour and keeps the meat moist during marinating.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps tenderise the meat.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and a firm, pale contrast to the dark meat.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and creaminess that moistens the salad and binds its flavours.
Aspic jelly
Sets into a savoury gel that adds moisture and a glossy finish.

The step that matters

Marinating the meat. Acid from the vinegar and lemon juice softens the meat's surface while the oil carries flavour into it. Turning the meat keeps every piece evenly coated, so the marinade penetrates uniformly rather than only on the exposed side.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Shallotfits about as well
  3. Asparagusfits about as well
  4. Lettucethe original

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