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Chicken Salad

A salad of shredded chicken, hard-boiled eggs, celery, olives, capers, and mayonnaise served on lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Chicken Salad

Why it works: Lettuce and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 372 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Chicken Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken and eggs

  1. Remove bones from the cooked chicken and cut the meat into very small pieces.

  2. Place the chicken in a bowl.

  3. Boil three eggs for 7-8 minutes, then chop the boiled eggs finely.

  4. Chop enough tender celery to fill a cup.

Make the salad

  1. Add the chopped celery to the chicken along with the chopped eggs.

  2. Lightly salt the mixture.

  3. Gently fold in some mayonnaise.

  4. Let it stand in a cool place for one hour.

Arrange and serve

  1. Arrange young lettuce leaves around a salad dish.

  2. Place the chicken salad in the center.

  3. Decorate with olives at the corners.

  4. Place sliced eggs in the center.

  5. Scatter capers over the top.

  6. Pour three tablespoons of thick mayonnaise over the salad just before serving.

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. Lettuce + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together372 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Olive + caperstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,688 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Lettuce + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

  5. Celery + caperstop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together405 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

Cooked chicken
Provides the main protein and bulk of the salad.
Hard boiled eggs
Add richness and a soft, creamy texture that binds the chicken.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and moisture, giving the salad its creamy body.
Celery
Adds crisp texture and a fresh, mild crunch against the soft chicken.

The step that matters

Let it stand in a cool place for one hour. Resting lets the salt and mayonnaise distribute through the chicken and celery and the flavours blend. Keeping it cool slows bacterial growth in the mayonnaise-based mixture.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, egg, lettuce, olive, capers. 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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