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Salad

Lettuce Salads

A salad of lettuce dressed with salt, pepper, oil, vinegar, and optional mustard or other seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 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 off the outer leaves of the lettuce.

  2. Wash the lettuce heads in cold water.

  3. Trim the leaves.

  4. Drain the leaves on a salad strainer.

  5. Drain the leaves on a napkin without pressing them.

  6. Put the lettuce in a salad bowl.

Make and add the dressing

  1. Season the lettuce with salt, pepper, sweet oil, and vinegar.

  2. Dress the salad only when ready to serve.

  3. Mash the yolk of a hard boiled egg in a bowl. Dilute the yolk with oil and vinegar. Add mustard. Mix well. Season with salt and pepper.

  4. Pour the dressing over the lettuce.

  5. 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 crisp, leafy base that the dressing coats.
Sweet oil
Carries the flavor of the dressing and coats the leaves to keep them from drying out.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the dressing and balances the oil.
Hard boiled egg yolk
Mashed with oil and vinegar to help emulsify and thicken the dressing.
Mustard
Adds sharpness and helps bind the oil and vinegar into a smoother dressing.

The step that matters

Dress the salad only when ready to serve. Salt and acid draw water out of lettuce leaves, so dressing early makes them limp and soggy. Dressing just before serving keeps them crisp.

Swap the chervil

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

  1. Chervilthe original
  2. Tarragonfits about as well
  3. Capersfits less well
  4. Dillfits less well

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