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Salad

Sweet Pepper Salad

A salad of sweet peppers, boiled beets, endive, hard-boiled eggs, and a butter, cayenne, and egg yolk dressing topped with whipped cream and mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Sweet Pepper Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the peppers and beets separately and chill them.

Assemble the salad

  1. Make a bed of endive on a serving platter.

  2. Fill the bed with the chopped peppers and beets.

  3. Cut the hard-boiled eggs so they stand on end and arrange them around the salad.

  4. Mix chopped parsley with butter, salt, cayenne pepper, and egg yolks to form a ball.

  5. Fill the egg whites with the mixture.

  6. Top the salad with generous fluffs of whipped cream mixed with thick mayonnaise, one fluff for each person.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Pepper + endivetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together308 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Pepper + creamtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together21,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Pepper and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 21,449 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

Egg yolks
Bind the butter and seasonings into a mixture that holds its shape.
Whipped cream
Adds a light, airy, creamy texture to the topping.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and richness, giving the topping a smooth, creamy body.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping the egg yolk mixture hold together.

The step that matters

Fill the egg whites with the mixture.. Egg yolks and butter are rich and can separate or go loose if overworked or warm, so the filling should be firm and cold enough to hold its shape.

Swap the endive

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, egg, butter, cream):

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Endivethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, egg, butter, cream. 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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