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Wilted Lettuce

A lettuce salad with browned ham and vinegar, served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and vinegar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,370 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Wilted Lettuce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Carefully pick over the lettuce and place it in a vegetable dish.

  2. Cut the lettuce across 3 or 4 times.

  3. Fry the ham in a pan until well browned.

  4. Cut the ham into small pieces.

Dress and serve

  1. Pour the vinegar into the pan and bring it to a boil.

  2. Immediately pour the hot vinegar over the lettuce.

  3. Cover closely and serve hot.

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. Lettuce + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,370 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Vinegar + hamtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-methylbutanol (malty, whiskey).

  3. Lettuce + hamtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together276 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Lettuce
Forms the bulk of the dish; hot vinegar softens its leaves so they wilt.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavor and helps wilt the leaves when poured hot.
Fat ham
Its rendered fat and browned bits add savory flavor and richness.

The step that matters

Immediately pour the hot vinegar over the lettuce. Vinegar must be at a boil and poured right away so the heat wilts the leaves quickly. If it cools first, the lettuce stays crisp and the dressing lacks flavor.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Cucumberfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, ham. 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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