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Summer Salad

A fresh salad of lettuce, watercress, radishes, cucumber, and hard‑boiled eggs dressed with a mustard‑vinegar oil dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 307 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Summer Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. In a bowl, mix sugar, salt, pepper, and mustard with the salad oil to form a paste.

  2. Finely pound the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs and mix them into the paste.

  3. Gradually whip in the vinegar until well combined.

Assemble and garnish

  1. Neatly arrange the chopped vegetables in a salad bowl.

  2. Strain the dressing over the vegetables.

  3. Garnish with sliced egg whites arranged in a chain and add a nasturtium flower every two or three links.

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 + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together307 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lettuce + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,356 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Lettuce + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Radish + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together212 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Watercress + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together293 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

Hard-boiled eggs
Yolks are mashed into the paste, adding richness and body to the dressing.
Salad oil
Forms the fat base of the dressing, carrying flavour and giving it a smooth texture.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the dressing and balances the oil and sugar.
Prepared mustard
Helps bind the oil and vinegar into a stable emulsion and adds sharp flavour.
White sugar
Softens the acidity of the vinegar, giving the dressing a mild sweetness.

The step that matters

Gradually whip in the vinegar. Adding vinegar slowly while whipping lets the oil and mustard-egg paste emulsify. Adding it all at once can split the dressing into separate layers of oil and liquid.

Swap the radish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, watercress, cucumber, egg, sugar, pepper, mustard):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Radishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, watercress, cucumber, egg, sugar, pepper, mustard. 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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