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Salad

Lettuce

A salad of lettuce leaves, hard-boiled eggs, radishes, dressed with vinegar, oil, mustard, and salad dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and mustard 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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Break the leaves apart from the stalk and rinse them in cold water.

Assemble the salad

  1. Lay the largest leaves in a salad bowl, followed by medium-sized leaves, and top with the finest white leaves.

  2. Slice or quarter the hard-boiled eggs and arrange them around the edge of the salad.

  3. Serve with vinegar, oil, and made mustard on the side.

Alternative method

  1. Cut the washed lettuce into small pieces and place in a glass dish.

  2. Pour salad dressing over the cut lettuce and garnish with halved or sliced radishes and quartered or sliced hard-boiled eggs before serving.

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

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

  2. Mustard + radishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together297 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Lettuce + radishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together58 recipes

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

  4. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Vinegar + radishtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together508 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Early lettuce
Forms the crisp, leafy base of the salad.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and a firm, creamy texture to the salad.
Small red radishes
Add a crisp texture and peppery bite as a garnish.
Made mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that cuts through the richness of the eggs.

Swap the radish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, egg, vinegar, mustard):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Cucumberfits better
  3. Beetrootfits about as well
  4. Radishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, egg, vinegar, 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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