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Salad

Raw Salad

A salad of raw spinach, watercress, parsley, and lettuce dressed with mayonnaise or French dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Watercress and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 307 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Raw Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Chop the raw spinach, watercress, and parsley together.

  2. Serve the mixture on a bed of shredded lettuce.

  3. Drizzle with mayonnaise or French 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. Watercress + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together307 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Spinach + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together427 recipes

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

  3. Spinach + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together97 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Watercress + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together469 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Raw spinach
Forms the leafy base of the salad and adds a mild, fresh flavor.
Watercress
Adds a peppery bite that contrasts with the milder greens.
Mayonnaise or french dressing
Adds fat and moisture, coating the leaves and giving richness.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (spinach, watercress, lettuce):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Cuminfits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spinach, watercress, 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.

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