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Salad

Water Cress Salad

A salad of watercress, pepper grass, and sorrel dressed with French dressing and garnished with nasturtium blossoms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and sorrel work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 419 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Water Cress Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine equal quantities of cress, pepper grass, and sorrel in a bowl.

  2. Drizzle with French dressing.

  3. Garnish with nasturtium blossoms 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. Pepper + sorreltop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together419 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + grasstop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together37 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  3. Grass + sorreltop 36% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 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

Cress
Provides the peppery, crisp leafy base of the salad.
Pepper grass
Adds a sharp, peppery bite that brightens the leaves.
Sorrel
Contributes a lemony acidity that gives the salad a tangy edge.
French dressing
Adds oil and acid that coat the leaves and carry flavour.

Swap the sorrel

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, grass):

  1. Sagefits better
  2. Clovefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Sorrelthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, grass. 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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