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Salad

Game Salad

A salad of cold roast game meat, lettuce, hard‑boiled eggs, celery, and aspic jelly, dressed with olive oil, tarragon vinegar, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Tarragon and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 425 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Game Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Remove the meat from the bones of any cold roast game and cut it into neat pieces.

  2. Place the meat in a deep dish and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  3. Pour over the olive oil, tarragon vinegar, and lemon juice. Add the bay leaf and lemon slices, then let it marinate for a few hours, turning occasionally.

Assemble and serve

  1. Shred the lettuce leaves finely and place some at the bottom of a salad bowl.

  2. Layer the marinated meat on top of the lettuce, finishing with another layer of meat. Arrange the last layer neatly and smoothly.

  3. Garnish the top with slices of hard-boiled eggs.

  4. Pour tarragon mayonnaise over the salad just before serving.

  5. Garnish with slices or quarters of hard-boiled eggs, curled celery, and diced aspic jelly.

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. Tarragon + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Tarragon + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,137 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Pepper + tarragontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 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

Cold roast game meat
Forms the main body of the salad and carries the marinade flavour.
Olive oil
Adds fat and moisture, carrying flavour through the marinated meat.
Tarragon vinegar
Provides acidity that brightens the meat and tenderises its surface during marinating.
Tarragon mayonnaise
Adds richness and moisture to the salad, dressing it just before serving.
Hard-boiled eggs
Adds richness and a firm, pale texture as garnish.

The step that matters

Marinating the meat. Acid from the vinegar and lemon juice slowly softens and flavours the meat's surface. Turning the pieces lets the marinade reach every side evenly, so the salad tastes consistent throughout.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, pepper, olive, tarragon, vinegar, lettuce, egg):

  1. Avocadofits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, pepper, olive, tarragon, vinegar, lettuce, egg. 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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