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Salad, Italian

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Salad, Italian

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cut thin slices of beetroot with a crimped cutter. Season with oil and vinegar, dust with mignonette pepper, and sprinkle with chopped egg whites and tiny fillets of anchovies.

  2. Fill stoned olives with pounded yolks mixed with a little mayonnaise using a piping bag.

  3. Arrange the salad herbs in a salad dish. If not fresh, soak them in spring water for 1-2 hours, wash, and drain.

  4. Boil eggs for 12 minutes, then cool in cold water. Sieve the yolks and mix with a tablespoon of water or cream, then add oil or melted butter.

  5. Gradually mix in salt or sugar and mustard, then slowly add vinegar until well combined. Garnish the salad with chopped egg whites.

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

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

  2. Lemon + olivetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Beetroot + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together965 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

  5. Vinegar + olivetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,297 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

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

Swap the beetroot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, pepper, egg, lemon, olive, cream, butter):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Beetrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, pepper, egg, lemon, olive, cream, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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