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Salad

Lettuce Salad

A lettuce salad dressed with a creamy egg yolk butter mustard dressing and seasoned with salt, pepper, cayenne, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,356 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Lettuce Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. Cream together the yolks of the hard boiled eggs, butter, sugar, salt, pepper, and mustard.

  2. Thin the mixture with vinegar until it reaches a creamy consistency.

Dress and serve

  1. Pour the dressing over the shredded lettuce and mix well.

  2. Garnish with the whites of the hard boiled eggs, sliced.

  3. For additional flavor, dress the lettuce with salt, cayenne pepper, powdered sugar, olive oil, and lemon juice.

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. Mustard + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,356 recipes

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

  2. Lettuce + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

  3. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mustard + olivetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Emulsify with butter to give the dressing its rich, creamy body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the dressing a smooth, creamy texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar and lemon.
Mustard
Adds sharp flavor and helps stabilise the emulsified dressing.
Vinegar
Adds acidity and thins the dressing to a creamy consistency.

The step that matters

Thin the mixture with vinegar until it reaches a creamy consistency. Adding vinegar too quickly can split the emulsion of yolk and butter. Adding it gradually and stirring keeps the dressing smooth and cohesive.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, butter, sugar, pepper, mustard, vinegar, olive):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits about as well
  3. Horseradishfits about as well
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, sugar, pepper, mustard, vinegar, olive. 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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