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Salad

French Salad

A salad of blanched endive tossed with herbs, salt, olive oil, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Endive and tarragon share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 75 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

French Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the endive

  1. Blanch the endive and wash it thoroughly.

  2. Break the endive into small pieces using your fingers.

  3. Shake the endive dry in a basket or fine cloth.

Assemble and serve

  1. Arrange the endive in a salad bowl.

  2. Strew minced tarragon and other herbs over the salad.

  3. Add salt and dressing just 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. Endive + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together75 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Endive + olivetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together209 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Tarragon + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,323 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Olive + vinegartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,297 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Endive
Provides the crisp, slightly bitter leaves that give the salad its body and texture.
Olive oil and vinegar
Dressing that adds fat for mouthfeel and acidity to balance the leaves.
Tarragon
Adds a distinct aromatic, anise-like flavour to the salad.

The step that matters

Add salt and dressing just before serving. Salt draws water out of leaves and acid wilts them, so dressing too early makes the endive limp and soggy. Adding it at the last moment keeps the leaves crisp.

Swap the endive

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tarragon, olive, vinegar):

  1. Mustardfits about as well
  2. Shallotfits about as well
  3. Lettucefits about as well
  4. Endivethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tarragon, olive, vinegar. 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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