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Salad

Summer Vegetable Salad

A chilled salad of sliced artichoke, cucumber, lettuce, pickled red cabbage or radishes, seasoned with salt and dressed with your choice of dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and chervil match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 396 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Summer Vegetable Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the artichoke bottoms, cucumber, and lettuce thinly.

  2. Sprinkle salt over the vegetables and cover the dish.

  3. Let it sit for 2 hours to draw out moisture.

Dress and serve

  1. Drain the liquid and add pickled red cabbage or chopped radishes.

  2. Pour salad dressing over the mixture and toss lightly.

  3. If desired, add mixed chervil leaves for extra flavor 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.

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 + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together396 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Artichoke + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Artichoke + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together101 recipes

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

  4. Cucumber + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

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

  5. Artichoke + cucumbertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together135 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Artichoke bottoms
Provide the main body of the salad with a tender, mild texture.
Cucumber
Adds moisture and a crisp, refreshing texture to the salad.
Lettuce heart
Forms the crisp, leafy base that holds the other vegetables.
Salt
Draws moisture out of the vegetables during the resting period.

The step that matters

Letting the salted vegetables rest. Salt draws water out of the vegetables through osmosis. Draining that liquid before dressing keeps the salad crisp and prevents it from becoming watery and diluted.

“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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