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Salad

Roquefort Salad

A lettuce salad with Roquefort cheese, hard‑boiled eggs, and a tarragon vinegar dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Tarragon and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 425 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Roquefort Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the lettuce.

  2. Crumble the cheese into very small bits.

  3. Run the eggs through a ricer.

Make and combine the dressing

  1. Make the French dressing by combining olive oil, tarragon vinegar, salt, and paprika.

  2. Blend the dressing carefully with the cheese.

  3. Mix with the lettuce until each leaf is coated.

Serve

  1. Serve in a salad bowl with crisp wafers.

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. Tarragon + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

  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. Vinegar + olivetop 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

Roquefort cheese
Provides a sharp, salty flavour that defines the dressing.
Olive oil
Forms the fat base of the French dressing, carrying flavour and coating the leaves.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the rich cheese and oil.
Hard boiled eggs
Add richness and body, blending into the dressing as a creamy element.

The step that matters

Blend the dressing carefully with the cheese. Oil and vinegar naturally separate, and crumbled cheese can stay in lumps. Blending slowly and thoroughly helps the cheese disperse evenly into the emulsified dressing so each bite tastes the same.

Swap the tarragon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (roquefort cheese, vinegar, egg, olive, lettuce):

  1. Capersfits about as well
  2. Tarragonthe original
  3. Garlicfits less well
  4. Parsleyfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against roquefort cheese, vinegar, egg, olive, 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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