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Salad

Oyster Salad

A salad of cooked oysters mixed with celery, vinegar, lemon, and mayonnaise, garnished with lemon, pickles, eggs, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Oyster Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cook the oysters in salted water until their edges begin to curl, then let them cool thoroughly.

  2. Chop the celery into small pieces and mix with salt, pepper, vinegar, and lemon juice.

  3. Add the whole oysters to the celery mixture.

Assemble and garnish

  1. Place the mixture on a dish and cover with mayonnaise dressing.

  2. Garnish with sliced lemon, pickles, hard boiled eggs, and parsley.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Oysters
Provide the main seafood body and savory flavor of the salad.
Celery
Adds crisp texture and a fresh, crunchy contrast to the soft oysters.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds fat and creaminess, binding the salad and adding moisture.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the richness of the dressing.

The step that matters

Cook the oysters until the edges just curl. Oysters turn tough and rubbery when overcooked. Stopping at the first curling of the edges keeps them tender, and cooling them thoroughly stops residual heat from cooking them further before they are mixed.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster, pepper, vinegar, lemon, egg, parsley):

  1. Dillfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster, pepper, vinegar, lemon, egg, parsley. 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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