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Macedoine Salad

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Turnip and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 526 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Macedoine Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the vegetables separately until tender.

  2. Cut the large vegetables into equal-sized dice.

  3. Mix the vegetables gently with French dressing or mayonnaise, being careful not to break them.

  4. Arrange the mixture on lettuce leaves.

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. Turnip + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together526 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cauliflower + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together286 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Cauliflower + asparagustop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together163 recipes

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

  5. Beans + asparagustop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together292 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

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, cauliflower, asparagus, carrot, turnip, lettuce):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Chickpeafits about as well
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, cauliflower, asparagus, carrot, turnip, lettuce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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