Skip to main content
Main

Chicken Salad

A chilled salad of chopped chicken, eggs, celery, and a lemon‑butter dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Chicken Salad

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Chicken Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the meat from the cooked chickens and chop it finely.

Make the dressing

  1. In a bowl, combine the lemon juice, melted butter, sweet oil, mustard, pepper, salt, sugar, and cream.

  2. Chop the egg whites finely and mash the yolks; add them to the mixture.

Assemble and serve

  1. Stir in the chopped celery and enough vinegar to moisten the salad.

  2. Mix everything well and serve chilled.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + mustardtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Chicken + meattop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Chicken + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,192 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked chicken
Provides the main body of the salad, with both light and dark meat adding texture.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and body, with the mashed yolks helping bind the dressing.
Melted butter
Adds fat and richness, coating the meat and giving a smooth mouthfeel.
Celery
Adds crunch and a fresh, crisp contrast to the soft meat and eggs.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the richness of the fats.

The step that matters

Add the vinegar gradually. Vinegar is added only enough to moisten, because too much thins the dressing and makes the salad wet and sharp. Adding it a little at a time lets the cook judge the texture as the celery and meat absorb the liquid.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, meat, lemon, egg, butter, pepper, sugar):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, meat, lemon, egg, butter, pepper, sugar. 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.

More chicken salad recipes

Dressing 31Sandwich 8with Mayonnaise 6Cream Cheese 5Moulded 5Chinese 4 See all 638 →

You might also like

Chicken BrothChicken Broth257 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesChicken SoupChicken Soup156 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipes