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Salad

Spanish Salad

A salad of diced cold chicken, boiled chestnuts, celery, mayonnaise, and lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Chestnut and lettuce share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 64 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Spanish Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dice the cold chicken.

  2. Boil the large Spanish chestnuts, then carefully remove the skin and cut them in half.

Assemble and serve

  1. Mix the chicken, chestnuts, and an equal quantity of chopped celery.

  2. Cover the mixture with mayonnaise.

  3. Serve on a bed of lettuce.

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. Chestnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Chestnut + celerytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together231 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Chicken + celerytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,375 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Chicken + lettucetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,421 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold chicken
Forms the main body of the salad as the protein.
Spanish chestnuts
Add a soft, starchy texture that contrasts with the chicken and celery.
Celery
Adds a crisp, crunchy texture to the salad.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and moisture, binding the salad and coating its ingredients.

Swap the celery

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Garlicfits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, chestnut, lettuce. 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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