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Truffle Salad, with Artichokes, Luning Style

A salad of sliced artichokes and truffles dressed with mustard, oil, and tarragon vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 901 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Truffle Salad, with Artichokes, Luning Style

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the artichokes

  1. Peel the artichokes and slice the bottoms thinly.

  2. Sprinkle with a little coarse sea salt and let macerate for 20 minutes. Drain on a napkin.

  3. Rub the bottom of a salad bowl with garlic.

Make the salad

  1. In the bowl, combine the artichokes and finely sliced truffles. Season with salt and pepper.

  2. In a separate bowl, rub the yolks of the hard boiled eggs through a fine sieve. Mix with the mustard, oil, and tarragon vinegar.

  3. Pour the dressing over the truffles and artichokes. Cover the bowl and mix well before serving.

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. Mustard + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together901 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Artichoke + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together600 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Artichoke + tarragontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together60 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Artichoke + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together116 recipes

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

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Artichokes
Provide the tender main body of the salad, soft after salting and draining.
Truffles
Contribute a strong earthy aroma that defines the dish.
Hard boiled egg yolks
Form a smooth, creamy base for the dressing when pushed through a sieve.
English mustard
Adds sharpness that balances the richness of the yolk and oil.
Oil
Adds fat and richness, carrying the dressing's flavour.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and cuts the richness.

The step that matters

Rub the egg yolks through a fine sieve. Pressing the cooked yolks through a fine sieve breaks them into very small particles, which blend with mustard, oil and vinegar into a smooth emulsified dressing. Unsieved lumps stay grainy and do not coat the artichokes evenly.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (artichoke, truffle, garlic, pepper, egg, mustard, tarragon):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against artichoke, truffle, garlic, pepper, egg, mustard, tarragon. 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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