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Mixed Vegetable Salad, Swedish Style

A salad of cooked carrots, beets, potatoes, smoked beef tongue, pickled herring, apple, seasoned with salt, pepper, oil, vinegar, mustard dressing, olives, and anchovies.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Mixed Vegetable Salad, Swedish Style

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Select equal quantities of cooked young carrots, beets, and potatoes, and cut them nicely with a fancy cutter.

Make the salad

  1. Put the vegetables in a bowl and add the smoked beef tongue, pickled herring, and sliced apple.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, oil, and vinegar.

  3. Add finely chopped parsley, chervil, and a few spoonfuls of mustard dressing.

  4. Mix well and arrange in a salad bowl.

Garnish and serve

  1. Garnish with stoned olives and boned anchovies.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Parsley + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together774 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  5. Carrot + cherviltop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together355 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked potatoes
Form the bulk of the salad and give it a soft, starchy body.
Beets
Add colour and a mild sweetness that contrasts with the vinegar and herring.
Pickled herring
Contributes salty, tangy flavour and a firm, flaky texture.
Smoked beef tongue
Adds smoky, savoury richness and a meaty texture.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the fat of the oil.

The step that matters

Cutting the cooked vegetables evenly. Uniform pieces cook through the dressing at the same rate and look neat. Cooked vegetables are already soft, so dicing too small or too roughly makes them mushy or uneven once mixed with the dressing.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, potato, beef, pepper, vinegar, parsley, chervil):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, potato, beef, pepper, vinegar, parsley, 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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