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Vegetable Salad, Italian Style

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Turnip and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Salad, Italian Style

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare turnips and carrots, cutting them into pieces with a column cutter the size of a quarter.

  2. Cook the pieces in lightly salted water until tender, then cool and slice them finely.

  3. Add equal quantities of boiled potatoes and pickled beets, cut in the same manner.

  4. In a bowl, season the vegetables with salt, pepper, olive oil, vinegar, and a little Eavigote sauce.

  5. Mix gently, arrange in a salad bowl, and garnish with hard-boiled eggs cut into quarters.

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. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  4. Potato + olivetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,458 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Turnip + potatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together562 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Swap the turnip

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, potato, pepper, olive, vinegar, sauce, egg):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Turnipthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, potato, pepper, olive, vinegar, sauce, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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