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Kale Salad

A salad of young kale leaves, garlic, salt, French dressing, and hard boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Kale and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 490 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Kale Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the kale

  1. Select the inside leaves of young kale, remove the roots, and wash the leaves thoroughly.

  2. Soak the leaves in salt water for 2 to 3 hours.

  3. Plunge the leaves into boiling water and cook until tender.

  4. Drain, press dry, and cut the leaves into 2-inch pieces.

Dress and serve

  1. Rub a salad bowl with a clove of garlic.

  2. Add the kale to the bowl, season, and mix with French salad dressing.

  3. Serve in the same bowl and garnish with quarters of hard boiled eggs.

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. Kale + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Kale + clovetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together95 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Kale + eggtop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together132 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  5. Clove + eggtop 35% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,584 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

Clove and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,584 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Young kale leaves
Forms the body of the salad and absorbs the dressing once cooked and pressed dry.
French salad dressing
Adds moisture, acidity and flavour that coat the cut kale pieces.
Hard boiled eggs
Adds richness and a soft, creamy contrast to the tender greens.

The step that matters

Drain and press the kale dry. Excess water left in the cooked leaves dilutes the dressing and makes the salad soggy, so the leaves must be pressed dry before they are dressed.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (kale, garlic, egg):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against kale, garlic, 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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