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Salad

Anchovy Salad

A salad of anchovies with lettuce, radishes, parsley, capers, lemon, and salad oil, topped with egg whites, yolks, and optional olives.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Anchovy Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the anchovies in water and remove the skins, heads, tails, fins, and bones.

  2. Cut the anchovies into thin strips and place them on a dish.

Assemble and serve

  1. Add the chopped lettuce, sliced radishes, chopped parsley, capers, and lemon slices, arranging them nicely.

  2. Mix lemon juice with a little salad oil and pour it over the salad.

  3. Serve garnished with chopped hard-boiled egg whites and yolks, and olives if desired.

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Parsley + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  5. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovies
Provide the main salty, savory flavour of the salad.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the salty anchovies.
Salad oil
Adds fat that carries the lemon flavour and gives the dressing body.
Lettuce
Forms the crisp, fresh base that holds the other ingredients.

Swap the radish

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, parsley, capers, lemon):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Kalefits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Radishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, parsley, capers, lemon. 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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