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Salad

Vegetable Salad

A salad of boiled string beans, carrots, beets, celery, onion, and turnip dressed with mayonnaise or mustard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Vegetable Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Cut the string beans into 1-inch lengths.

  2. Cook the beans in salted boiling water until tender.

  3. Boil the beets and carrot until soft, then cut into small cubes.

  4. Slice the onion into small pieces and break the celery into bits.

Assemble and chill

  1. Combine all the vegetables in a bowl.

  2. Sprinkle with salt and dust with cayenne pepper.

  3. Pour on the mayonnaise or mustard dressing and mix well.

  4. Refrigerate for 30 minutes 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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Celery + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Celery + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Turnip + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together290 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

String beans
Provide the main bulk and a tender-crisp texture once cooked.
Beets
Add earthy sweetness and a firm, sliceable texture when boiled until soft.
Celery
Adds crisp texture and a fresh, slightly sharp crunch to the salad.
Mayonnaise or mustard dressing
Adds fat and moisture, binding the vegetables and carrying the seasoning.

The step that matters

Cooking the beans until tender. Beans cooked in salted boiling water must be stopped at tender; undercooked beans stay fibrous and overcooked ones turn soft and dull in colour.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, carrot, celery, turnip, pepper, mustard):

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Broccolifits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, carrot, celery, turnip, pepper, 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.

More vegetable salad recipes

Mixed 12Boiled 5Red 5Compound 4Gelatin 4Frozen 3 See all 47 →

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