Skip to main content

Sliced Lemon

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Watercress and sorrel share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Sliced Lemon

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Slice the lemon and arrange the slices on a platter.

  2. Alternate lemon slices with small clusters of curled lettuce, parsley, or watercress.

  3. Use boiled or fried fennel with mackerel or salmon.

  4. Garnish with hard-boiled eggs, either alone or alternated with greens.

  5. Add fried oysters around the edge of the platter 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. Watercress + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lettuce + sorreltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together317 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  5. Parsley + fenneltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together625 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, parsley, watercress, celery, oyster, sorrel, fennel):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, parsley, watercress, celery, oyster, sorrel, fennel. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

You might also like

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