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Salad

Cheese Salad

A salad made with hard‑boiled egg yolk, grated cheese, mustard, vinegar, onion, cayenne pepper, olive oil, sugar, salt, and lettuce leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,259 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cheese Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. Rub the hard-boiled egg yolk smooth with the olive oil.

  2. Mix in the mustard, sugar, salt, and cayenne one at a time, mixing thoroughly after each addition.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the grated cheese and the vinegar that has been infused with the onion for 30 minutes.

  2. Serve the mixture on 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. Mustard + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  2. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Olive + mustardtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Olive + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Hard-boiled egg yolk
Its fats and emulsifiers help bind the oil and seasonings into a smooth dressing.
Olive oil
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and giving the mixture a smooth, silky texture.
Grated cheese
Provides the main body, savoury flavour and bulk of the salad.
Mustard
Adds sharp flavour and helps stabilise the emulsion of oil and yolk.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and cuts through the richness of the cheese and oil.

The step that matters

Mixing in the seasonings one at a time. Egg yolk and oil form an emulsion that can break if ingredients are added too quickly. Adding each seasoning slowly and mixing thoroughly keeps the dressing smooth and evenly seasoned.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, pepper, olive, cheese, mustard, vinegar, sugar):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Cucumberfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, pepper, olive, cheese, mustard, 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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