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Salad

Vegetable Salad

A salad of cooked carrots, sweet potatoes, potatoes, turnips, string beans, tossed with French dressing and garnished with lettuce leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 526 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cook the vegetables separately, adding salt towards the end of cooking.

  2. Once cool, cut the vegetables into ½ inch cubes.

  3. Cut the string beans into ½ inch lengths.

Assemble and serve

  1. Mix all the vegetables together with the French dressing.

  2. Garnish with lettuce leaves.

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. Turnip + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together526 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sweet potato + beanstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together165 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Beans + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together500 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Sweet potato + turniptop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together71 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

Carrots
Provide the bulk of the firm, sweet texture and colour in the salad.
Sweet potatoes
Add body and natural sweetness that balances the tangy dressing.
Potatoes
Give a soft, starchy bulk that holds the cubes together.
Turnips
Contribute a mildly peppery bite and firm texture.
String beans
Add crisp texture and a fresh, green flavour.

The step that matters

Cook the vegetables separately. Each vegetable needs a different cooking time, so cooking them separately keeps every piece tender without turning the softer ones mushy. Salting near the end seasons them evenly as they finish cooking.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, sweet potato, turnip, beans, lettuce):

  1. Beetrootfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, sweet potato, turnip, beans, lettuce. 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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