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Molded Dandelion Salad

A salad of boiled dandelion greens and hard‑boiled eggs, seasoned with salt and mayonnaise, molded into nests and served on lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Dandelion and egg work together. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 51 recipes. Both carry 2-heptenal, which smells green. The science ↓

Molded Dandelion Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the greens

  1. Wash the dandelion greens and cook them in boiling salted water until very tender, changing the water once.

  2. Drain the greens and pass them through a potato ricer.

Assemble and mold

  1. Shell and finely chop the hard‑boiled eggs, then add salt and mayonnaise. Mix well and pack the mixture into small molds.

Serve

  1. When ready to serve, unmold onto individual nests of lettuce leaves and serve with additional dressing.

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. Dandelion + eggtop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together51 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptenal (green).

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

What each ingredient does

Dandelion greens
Provides the bulk and mild bitter flavor; cooking until very tender makes them soft enough to pack into molds.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and body, and their finely chopped texture helps the mixture hold its molded shape.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and moisture, binding the chopped eggs and greens together.

The step that matters

Cooking the greens until very tender. Dandelion greens are fibrous and bitter; cooking them thoroughly softens the cell walls so the greens can be pressed through a ricer and packed smoothly, and changing the water helps reduce bitterness.

“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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