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Salad

Winter Salads

A salad of endive, celery, red cabbage, onion, and beetroot, dressed with salad sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Endive and beetroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 132 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Winter Salads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the endive and celery thoroughly in two or three waters.

  2. Dry them perfectly and shred the red cabbage finely.

  3. Rub the inside of a salad bowl with the slice of onion.

Assemble and serve

  1. Combine the mixed vegetables in the bowl and toss lightly with salad sauce.

  2. Garnish with slices of boiled beetroot and serve.

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. Endive + beetroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together132 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Endive + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together121 recipes

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

  3. Celery + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Mustard + beetroottop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together484 recipes

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

  5. Cabbage + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,645 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Endive
Provides crisp, bitter leaves that give the salad its main body and texture.
Celery
Adds crunch and a fresh, watery crispness to the mixed vegetables.
Red cabbage
Adds crisp texture and a mild sweetness along with its colour.
Salad sauce
Adds moisture and fat that coat the vegetables and carry flavour.

The step that matters

Dry the vegetables perfectly before dressing. Any water left on the leaves and shredded cabbage dilutes the salad sauce so it slides off instead of coating the vegetables, and wet leaves wilt and lose crispness faster.

Swap the mustard

The recipe marks mustard as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (endive, celery, cabbage, onion, sauce, beetroot):

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Turnipfits about as well
  3. Horseradishfits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against endive, celery, cabbage, onion, sauce, beetroot. 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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