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Salad

Sardine Salad

A salad of cold dressed fish, gherkins, capers, sausage, sardines, lettuce, eggs, and sauce of sardine flesh, egg yolks, cayenne, nutmeg, oil, vinegar, and wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Capers and lettuce 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 ↓

Sardine Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Assemble the salad

  1. Remove skin and bones from the cold dressed fish and tear it into flakes.

  2. Layer the fish in the center of a dish and sprinkle with minced gherkins and bruised capers.

  3. Add a layer of sliced German sausage on top.

  4. Place sardines, split in half and freed from skin and bones, on top of the pile.

  5. Cut lettuce hearts into quarters and arrange them around the salad.

  6. Garnish with hard-boiled eggs cut into quarters lengthwise.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, mash the flesh of 3 sardines in a mortar until smooth.

  2. Mix in the yolks of 2 hard-boiled eggs.

  3. Add a pinch of cayenne, a grate of nutmeg, and 2 tablespoons each of oil, vinegar, and light wine slowly, beating well after each addition.

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. Capers + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together372 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Capers + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together211 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lettuce + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together184 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Capers + saucetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together678 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Vinegar + winetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,493 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

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

What each ingredient does

Sardines
Provide the savory fish flavor and the oily richness that carries the dressing.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Thicken the sauce into a smooth, creamy emulsion body.
Oil
Adds fat and richness, helping the sauce emulsify and turn smooth.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the rich fish.
Light wine
Adds acidity and aroma that lift the flavor of the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the oil, vinegar and wine slowly. Adding liquids gradually while beating lets the oil disperse into tiny droplets held by the egg yolk, giving a smooth emulsion. Dumping them in at once can split the sauce into a greasy, watery mixture.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, capers, lettuce, egg, sauce, vinegar, wine):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Dillfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, capers, lettuce, egg, sauce, vinegar, wine. 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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