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Salad

Salmon Mayonnaise

A salad of lettuce, flaked salmon, mayonnaise, anchovy fillets, capers, stone olives, hard‑boiled eggs, and lettuce hearts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and capers 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 ↓

Salmon Mayonnaise

Ingredients

Directions

Assemble

  1. Garnish the bottom of a salad bowl with chopped lettuce.

  2. Cover with cold, cooked, and flaked salmon, ensuring all skin and bones are removed.

  3. Coat the salmon with mayonnaise.

Decorate and serve

  1. Decorate with anchovy fillets, capers, stoned olives, and slices of hard-boiled eggs.

  2. Add small hearts of lettuce for garnish.

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 + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together372 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Capers + olivetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,688 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lettuce + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

  4. Anchovy + caperstop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together473 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  5. Salmon + anchovytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together535 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Salmon
Forms the main body of the salad and supplies its savory, rich flavour.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and moisture, binding the flaked salmon and giving it a creamy texture.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add a soft, creamy texture and mild richness to the salad.
Lettuce
Provides a crisp, cool base that contrasts with the creamy salmon.

The step that matters

Remove all skin and bones from the salmon. Stray bones are a choking hazard and skin left in the flakes gives an unpleasant texture, so the salmon must be checked carefully after flaking.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (salmon, anchovy, capers, olive, egg):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Welsh onionfits about as well
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against salmon, anchovy, capers, olive, egg. 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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