Skip to main content
Salad

Chiffonade Dressing

A dressing made with hard‑boiled egg yolk and white, beet, olives, mayonnaise, tarragon vinegar, salt, sugar, cayenne pepper, served over lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Chiffonade Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. In a bowl, combine the minced yolk and white of the hard boiled egg.

  2. Add the chopped beet, chopped olives, and mayonnaise.

  3. Thin the mixture with tarragon vinegar and season with salt, sugar, and cayenne pepper.

Serve

  1. Serve over head lettuce and garnish with white cherries.

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. Tarragon + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Olive + tarragontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,323 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard boiled egg
Yolk and white add richness and body to the creamy dressing.
Mayonnaise
Provides fat and creaminess, binding the chopped ingredients into a smooth dressing.
Beet
Adds color and a mild earthy sweetness to the dressing.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds acidity that thins the mixture and brightens its flavor.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Lettucethe original

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

You might also like

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes