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Salad

Macedoine Salad

A salad of marinated carrots, turnips, potatoes, string beans, lettuce, parsley, and French dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Macedoine Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Marinate the carrots, turnips, potatoes, and string beans separately with French dressing.

Assemble and serve

  1. On a serving dish, create sections with the marinated vegetables over a base of shredded lettuce.

  2. Garnish with additional lettuce and sprinkle chopped parsley over the top.

  3. To shred lettuce, remove leaves from the stalk, wash, drain, and cut into narrow strips using scissors.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Turnip + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together526 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Beans + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together500 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked carrots
Provide firm texture and mild sweetness as a main vegetable component.
Cooked turnips
Add firm texture and a mildly peppery flavor to the salad.
Cooked potatoes
Contribute starchy bulk and absorb French dressing for flavor.
Cooked string beans
Add tender-crisp texture and fresh green flavor to the salad.

The step that matters

Marinating the vegetables separately. Each vegetable absorbs dressing at a different rate, and dressing them apart lets each take up flavor evenly without the softer potatoes breaking up or the others being over-coated by acid and oil.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, beans, parsley, lettuce):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, beans, parsley, lettuce. 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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