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Salad

Lettuce and Radishes

A chilled salad of lettuce leaves and young radishes dressed with lemon, sugar, and optional cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and radish share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 58 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Lettuce and Radishes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lettuce

  1. Wash each lettuce leaf separately and soak in cold water.

  2. Set the lettuce on ice or in a cool cellar for at least an hour.

  3. Dry the leaves with a soft towel and tear into pieces using a silver fork.

Make the dressing

  1. For the dressing, mix equal parts lemon juice and sugar, diluted with a little ice water.

  2. Alternatively, mix three or four tablespoons of thin cream with one teaspoon of sugar.

  3. Add a little lemon juice to the cream if desired, just enough to thicken without curdling.

Arrange and serve

  1. Wash the radishes thoroughly and arrange them in a glass dish with the ends meeting.

  2. Scatter bits of cracked ice among the radishes.

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 + radishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together58 recipes

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

  2. Lettuce + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,559 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + radishtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together174 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Lettuce leaves
Form the crisp, leafy base of the salad.
Young tender radishes
Add crisp texture and a peppery bite to the salad.
Thin cream
Provides richness and a smooth, creamy body to the dressing.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and, with cream, thickens it gently.
Sugar
Balances the acidity of the lemon juice with gentle sweetness.

The step that matters

Adding lemon juice to the cream. Acid can curdle cream if added too quickly or in excess. Adding only a little lemon juice and stopping once the cream thickens keeps the dressing smooth.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, sugar, cream, radish):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, sugar, cream, radish. 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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