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Lettuce Salads

A salad made from lettuce, seasoned with salt, pepper, oil, and vinegar, optionally dressed with hard boiled egg yolk, mustard, or other additions.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and chervil match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 396 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lettuce Salads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lettuce

  1. Trim the outer leaves of the lettuce and wash the heads in cold water.

  2. Trim the leaves and drain them on a salad strainer.

  3. Before serving, drain on a napkin without pressing the leaves.

Dress and serve

  1. Place the lettuce in a salad bowl and season with salt, pepper, oil, and vinegar.

  2. Dress the salad just before serving.

  3. For a mustard dressing, mash the yolk of a hard boiled egg in a bowl, dilute with oil and vinegar, add mustard, and season with salt and pepper.

  4. Pour the dressing over the lettuce and mix gently with a wooden spoon and fork.

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 + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together396 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Mustard + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together207 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 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

Lettuce
Forms the body of the salad; its crisp leaves give the dish its texture.
Sweet oil
Carries flavour and coats the leaves, giving a smooth, slippery mouthfeel.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the richness of the oil.

The step that matters

Drain the leaves without pressing them. Excess water left on the leaves dilutes the dressing and makes it slide off, while pressing bruises the leaves and makes them limp. Gentle draining keeps them crisp enough to hold the dressing.

Swap the mustard

The recipe marks mustard as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, pepper, vinegar, egg, sugar, cream, chervil):

  1. Mustardthe original
  2. Chivefits about as well
  3. Beetrootfits about as well
  4. Shallotfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, pepper, vinegar, egg, sugar, cream, chervil. 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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