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Salad

Salade D'olives

A salad of olives stuffed with chicken and ham, served on lettuce with egg yolk dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Olive and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,580 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Salade D'olives

Ingredients

Directions

Assemble the salad

  1. Fill the pitted olives with a mixture of chopped chicken and ham.

  2. Lay the stuffed olives on crisp lettuce leaves.

  3. In the center of the dish, place a mound of hard‑boiled egg yolks, rubbed through a sieve into a powder.

  4. Crumb the whites of the hard‑boiled eggs with a fork and use them to garnish the outer edge of the salad, along with unstuffed pitted olives.

Dress and serve

  1. Pour over a plain French dressing and serve very cold.

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. Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

  2. Olive + chickentop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,888 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid hexyl ester (sweet, green).

  3. Chicken + hamtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,497 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Chicken + lettucetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,421 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Ham + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,526 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pitted olives
Serve as the main vessel and visual centre, holding the filling and adding briny flavour.
Chopped chicken
Adds savoury bulk and a firm, meaty texture to the olive filling.
Chopped ham
Contributes salty, savoury flavour and body to the filling.
Hard-boiled eggs
Yolks give a dry, powdery, rich texture; whites add mild body and contrast as garnish.

The step that matters

Serve very cold. Cold keeps the chicken, ham and egg firm and food-safe, and it mutes the flavour of the dressing so the salad stays fresh. Warm dressing or a warm dish would soften the egg and lettuce quickly.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (olive, chicken, ham, egg):

  1. Tomatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against olive, chicken, ham, 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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