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Vegetable Salad

A salad of boiled potatoes, beets, and watercress dressed with butter, cream, vinegar, salt, pepper, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and watercress work together. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 170 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the vegetables

  1. Boil new potatoes in a pot until done.

  2. Boil young beets in a separate pot until done.

Assemble the salad

  1. Slice the boiled potatoes and beets into a serving dish, layering them alternately. Sprinkle each layer with coarse sea salt, pepper, and small lumps of butter. Finish with a layer of beets.

  2. Pour a little sweet cream or milk, or vinegar over the top.

Prepare the watercress

  1. Wash and pick over the watercress, removing stems, and place in a salad bowl. Dress the watercress with vinegar, pepper, salt, and sugar, stirring well.

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. Potato + watercresstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together170 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

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

  4. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Pepper + watercresstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together983 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

New potatoes
Provide the main starchy body of the salad, holding their shape when sliced and boiled.
Young beets
Add earthy sweetness and colour, and their moisture keeps the layers tender.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel as it melts over the warm layers.
Sweet cream or milk
Adds richness and softens the flavour of the layered vegetables.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet beets and rich dairy.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, butter, cream, watercress, vinegar, sugar):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, cream, watercress, vinegar, sugar. 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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