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Lettuce and Watercress Salad

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and chive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 261 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lettuce and Watercress Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Wash the tender lettuce leaves and soak them in ice water for a few minutes.

  2. Dry the leaves and arrange them in a bowl with the largest leaves on the outside.

  3. Sprinkle chopped chives or thinly sliced new onions over the lettuce.

  4. If desired, rub the bowl with garlic before adding the lettuce.

  5. Mix the salad with French dressing.

  6. Garnish with radishes cut to resemble roses or tulips.

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 + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together261 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Chive + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,149 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Chive + radishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together30 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  5. Olive + garlictop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,665 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

Swap the garlic

The recipe marks garlic as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, chive, olive, radish):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits about as well
  3. Garlicthe original
  4. Parsleyfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, chive, olive, radish. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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