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Vegetable Salad

A salad of boiled potatoes, beets, celery, carrots, onions, and hard boiled eggs dressed with French dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Vegetable Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Cut the potatoes, beets, celery, and carrots into cubes or fancy shapes.

  2. Sprinkle the vegetables with salt and pepper.

  3. Chop the onion finely and mix it into the French dressing.

Layer and serve

  1. Layer the vegetables alternately in a serving dish.

  2. Rub a little of the yolk of the hard boiled eggs through a fine sieve over each layer.

  3. Drizzle the French dressing over the layered vegetables.

  4. Decorate the salad with a border of chopped egg white, parsley, and the sieved yolk.

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. Celery + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 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

Potatoes
Provide the bulk and firm, starchy body of the salad.
Beets
Add color and a sweet, earthy flavor to the layers.
Eggs
Yolks are sieved for a soft, creamy garnish; whites add a chopped border.
French dressing
Adds moisture and acidity that flavors and softens the vegetables.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, celery, carrot, egg, parsley, pepper):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, celery, carrot, egg, parsley, pepper. 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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