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Salad

Salad Without Meats

A lettuce, tomato, cucumber, and onion salad topped with a lemon‑egg yolk dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,356 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Salad Without Meats

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the salad

  1. Separate and wash the lettuce leaves thoroughly.

  2. Soak the lettuce leaves in cold water to crisp.

  3. Wipe the lettuce dry and spread it out on a flat dish.

  4. Peel and slice the tomatoes and cucumber thinly, layering them over the lettuce.

  5. Add onion if desired.

Make the dressing

  1. Cook the yolk of one egg in a bowl, stirring constantly to make a smooth paste.

  2. Let the cooked yolk cool.

  3. Stir in the two raw egg yolks, mustard, salt, and sugar to taste.

  4. Add olive oil and the juice of one lemon to the mixture, stirring well.

Serve

  1. Just before serving, pour the dressing over the salad.

  2. Slice a lemon over the top.

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 + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,356 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Lettuce + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Tomato + olivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,539 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Cucumber + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,281 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Tomato + cucumbertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Emulsify with the oil and lemon juice to give the dressing a smooth, creamy body.
Olive oil
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and giving the dressing a silky mouthfeel.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the richness of the yolks and oil.
Mustard
Acts as an emulsifier that helps hold the oil and yolk mixture together and adds sharpness.
Lettuce
Provides the crisp, watery base that the dressing coats and the other vegetables rest on.

The step that matters

Cooking the yolk into a smooth paste. Stirring the cooked yolk constantly keeps it from clumping or scrambling, so it blends evenly. Letting it cool before adding the raw yolks prevents the raw yolks from partly cooking on contact with heat, which keeps the dressing smooth.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, tomato, cucumber, egg, mustard, sugar, olive):

  1. Endivefits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Broccolifits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, tomato, cucumber, egg, mustard, sugar, olive. 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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