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Salads with Mayonnaise

Contains raw egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and capers 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 ↓

Salads with Mayonnaise

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Tear lettuce into pieces with fingers, do not cut with a knife.

  2. Combine chicken and celery in equal proportions, place in the center of a salad dish, and form into a mound.

  3. Mix 1/3 cup vinegar with 1 cup oil, adding salt and pepper to taste.

  4. Spread mayonnaise thickly over the mound.

  5. Decorate with lettuce leaves, hard-boiled eggs, olives, capers, beet slices, and pickled peppers as desired.

  6. Keep salad cool until serving, and do not mix mayonnaise with the salad until ready to serve.

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 + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together372 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Olive + caperstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,688 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

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

Swap the capers

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits about as well
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Capersthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, pepper, chicken, celery, lettuce, egg, olive. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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