Skip to main content
Salad

Brown and White Italian Salad

A salad of lettuce, endive, anchovies, beetroot, eggs, olives, dressed with tarragon vinegar, mayonnaise, capers, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lettuce and endive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 284 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Brown and White Italian Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and dry the lettuce and endive thoroughly.

  2. Shred the lettuce finely and toss it with tarragon vinegar and coarse sea salt.

Assemble and serve

  1. Place the salad on a cool dish and top with rolled anchovies and parsley.

  2. Just before serving, toss the salad with mayonnaise.

  3. Garnish with boiled beetroot cut into strips and quartered hard-boiled eggs.

  4. Crown the salad with stoned olives and serve.

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 + endivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together284 recipes

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

  2. Lettuce + beetroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together678 recipes

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

  3. Endive + beetroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together132 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Endive + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together32 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Capers + beetroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together231 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Provide a salty, savoury flavour that contrasts with the mild lettuce.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and creaminess, coating the leaves and giving the salad a rich texture.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and a soft, creamy texture to the salad.
Lettuce
Forms the crisp, fresh base of the salad.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds acidity and a sharp, aromatic note that brightens the leaves.

The step that matters

Toss with mayonnaise just before serving. Dressing the leaves too early lets the mayonnaise thin and the moisture from the lettuce collect, leaving the salad soggy and limp.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, endive, tarragon, vinegar, capers, beetroot, egg):

  1. Parsleythe original
  2. Dillfits about as well
  3. Fennelfits about as well
  4. Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, endive, tarragon, vinegar, capers, beetroot, egg. 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.

You might also like

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes