Skip to main content
Salad

Summer Salad

A chilled salad of lettuce, mustard leaves, watercress, radishes, cucumber, hard‑boiled eggs, dressed with sugar, salt, pepper, mustard, vinegar, and oil.

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

Why it works: Lettuce and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 307 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Summer Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the lettuce, green mustard leaves, watercress, radishes, and cucumber.

  2. Slice the hard-boiled eggs.

Dress and serve

  1. In a large bowl, combine all the chopped ingredients with sugar, salt, pepper, and prepared mustard.

  2. Drizzle with vinegar and oil, then mix well.

  3. Serve with a lump of ice in the center.

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 + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together307 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lettuce + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,356 recipes

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

  3. Lettuce + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

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

  4. Radish + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together212 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Mustard + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together293 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

Lettuce
Forms the bulk of the salad and provides crisp, watery texture.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and body to the salad.
Oil
Adds fat that carries flavour and gives the dressing a smooth mouthfeel.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that brightens the flavours and balances the oil.
Prepared mustard
Adds sharp flavour and helps the oil and vinegar emulsify.
White sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the acidity of the vinegar.

Swap the radish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, mustard, watercress, cucumber, egg, sugar, pepper):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Radishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, mustard, watercress, cucumber, egg, sugar, pepper. 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 summer salad recipes

Mixed 9 See all 30 →

You might also like

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes