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Fish Salad

A salad of boiled fish mixed with pepper, salt, capers or allspice, vinegar, and served on lettuce leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Capers and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 372 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Fish Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fish

  1. Remove the skin, fat, and bones from the fish and cut it into small pieces.

  2. Sprinkle the fish with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  3. Add capers or whole allspice and enough vinegar to cover the fish.

  4. Cover and let it stand for a few hours.

Serve

  1. Serve on lettuce leaves with or without dressing.

  2. For an alternative, mix small pieces of salmon, white fish, or trout with an equal quantity of lettuce or cabbage and a few slices of hard-boiled eggs.

  3. Serve with any good dressing and garnish with heart leaves of lettuce.

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. Capers + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together372 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lettuce + cabbagetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together622 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + cabbagetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,081 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 recipes

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

  5. Capers + cabbagetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50 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

Fish
Forms the main body of the salad and provides its flavour and texture.
Vinegar
Acidity firms and sharpens the fish as it stands, preserving it and adding tang.
Lettuce leaves
Provide a crisp, cool base that contrasts with the marinated fish.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and a soft, creamy texture to the salad.

The step that matters

Cover and let it stand for a few hours. The vinegar must fully cover the fish so acid penetrates evenly. Too little liquid or too short a rest leaves the fish unevenly firmed and insufficiently tangy, while the acid gradually denatures the proteins and firms the flesh.

Swap the cabbage

The recipe marks cabbage as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, pepper, capers, vinegar, lettuce, egg):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Cucumberfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, pepper, capers, vinegar, lettuce, 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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