Skip to main content
Dessert

Dutch Salad

A salad of anchovies, herring, sausage, veal, beet-roots, pickled cucumbers, potatoes, capers, eggs, olives, dressed with oil, tarragon vinegar, white pepper, and French mustard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Capers and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 379 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Dutch Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the ingredients

  1. Wash, split, and bone the anchovies, then roll each one up.

  2. Wash, split, and bone the herring, then cut it into small pieces.

  3. Cut the Bologna or Lyons sausage (or smoked ham) into dice.

  4. Cut the cold roast fowl or veal into dice.

  5. Cut the beet-roots, pickled cucumbers, and cold boiled potatoes into dice, using at least three times as much potato as anything else.

Assemble and dress

  1. Add 1 tablespoon of capers, the minced yolks and whites of hard-boiled eggs, and the stoned olives.

  2. Mix all the ingredients well, reserving the olives and anchovies for garnish.

  3. Beat together oil, Tarragon vinegar, white pepper, and French mustard to taste.

  4. Pour the dressing over the salad 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. Capers + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together379 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cucumber + caperstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together303 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Cucumber + tarragontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together274 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Cucumber + olivetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

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

What each ingredient does

Herring
Provides the salty, savoury fish flavour that anchors the salad.
Cold boiled potatoes
Makes up the bulk of the salad and absorbs the dressing, giving body and moisture.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and a creamy texture from the yolks and whites.
Oil
Carries the flavour of the dressing and adds fat and a smooth mouthfeel.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and cuts the richness of the eggs and fish.
French mustard
Adds sharpness and helps emulsify the oil and vinegar into the dressing.

The step that matters

Beat the dressing before pouring it over the salad. Beating oil with vinegar and mustard temporarily emulsifies them, so the dressing coats the pieces evenly instead of separating into greasy pools. Mustard helps hold the emulsion together.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, veal, cucumber, capers, egg, olive, tarragon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, veal, cucumber, capers, egg, olive, tarragon. 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.

You might also like

Deep-Fried Potato BallsDeep-Fried Potato Balls119 recipesOrange Potato BreadOrange Potato Bread80 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipes