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Salad

Chicken Salad

A salad of shredded chicken, celery, and mayonnaise, served on lettuce and garnished with lemon, eggs, capers, olives, and peppers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Chicken Salad

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 ↓

Chicken Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Boil the chicken until tender, then cool and tear the meat from the bone.

  2. Remove all fat, gristle, and skin, then cut the meat into small cubes.

Make the salad

  1. Add the celery to the chicken and mix thoroughly.

  2. Sprinkle with salt and a few drops of lemon juice, then place on ice.

  3. Just before serving, add enough mayonnaise dressing to make the salad moist and stir well.

Serve

  1. Serve a spoonful of the salad on a lettuce leaf, topped with a teaspoon of mayonnaise dressing.

  2. Garnish with lemon, sliced hard boiled eggs, capers, olives, or sweet Spanish peppers.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Capers + olivetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,688 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  5. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main protein; boiling until tender makes the meat soft enough to tear and cube.
Celery
Adds crisp texture that contrasts with the soft chicken and mayonnaise.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds fat and moisture, binding the salad and keeping the chicken from drying out.

The step that matters

Adding the mayonnaise dressing. Add it just before serving. Mayonnaise is an emulsion that can thin or separate over time, and the chicken and celery release liquid as they stand, so an early addition can make the salad watery or greasy.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, lemon, lettuce, egg, capers, olive, pepper):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, lemon, lettuce, egg, capers, olive, 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.

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