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Salad

Chicken or Sweetbread Salads

A salad of cold boiled chicken or sweetbreads with celery, lettuce, beet, tomato, hard boiled eggs, radishes, and dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and radish share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 58 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Chicken or Sweetbread Salads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the cold boiled chicken or sweetbreads into pieces.

  2. Mix with equal parts of chopped celery.

  3. Add a little salad dressing and chill in the refrigerator until ready to use.

Serve

  1. Serve on lettuce leaves, pour more dressing over, and garnish with celery leaves, fancy-shaped beet pieces, sliced tomato, hard boiled eggs colored in beet vinegar, or radishes cut to resemble pond lilies.

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 + radishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together58 recipes

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

  2. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Celery + tomatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

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

  4. Lettuce + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,655 recipes

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

  5. Celery + radishtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together101 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken or sweetbreads
Provides the main protein and body of the salad, giving it a substantial, tender bite.
Chopped celery
Adds crisp texture and a fresh, mild crunch that contrasts with the soft meat.
Salad dressing
Supplies moisture and richness, coating the pieces and keeping the salad from drying out.
Hard boiled eggs
Add soft, creamy texture and mild richness as a garnish.

The step that matters

Chill the salad after dressing it. Chilling lets the dressing cool and firm slightly and lets the flavors meld, so the salad holds together and tastes balanced when served cold.

Swap the radish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, celery, lettuce, tomato, egg):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Radishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, celery, lettuce, tomato, 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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