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Winter Salad

A salad of boiled potatoes, onion, watercress, beetroot, and optional eggs, apples, or orange, dressed with pepper, salt, oil, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Watercress and beetroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 143 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Winter Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the cold boiled potatoes into small pieces.

  2. Grate the onion and mix it with the potatoes.

Assemble and season

  1. Add watercress or mustard and cress, and the boiled and sliced beetroot.

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

  3. If desired, add sliced hard-boiled eggs, apples, or pieces of orange.

  4. If using oranges, omit the onion.

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. Watercress + beetroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together143 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Potato + watercresstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together170 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Potato + beetroottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together330 recipes

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

  5. Onion + beetroottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,261 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
Form the bulk of the salad and absorb the dressing, giving it body.
Onion
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that brightens the starchy potatoes.
Beetroot
Provides earthy sweetness and a vivid colour to the salad.
Oil
Carries fat-soluble flavour and gives the salad a smooth, rich mouthfeel.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that cuts the richness of the oil and sharpens the flavours.

Swap the apple

The recipe marks apple as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, onion, watercress, beetroot, pepper, vinegar, egg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, onion, watercress, beetroot, pepper, vinegar, 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.

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