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Salad

Brazil-nut Salad

A salad of sliced Brazil nuts, boiled Jerusalem artichokes, and mayonnaise dressing, seasoned with salt, paprika, and white wine.

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 ↓

Brazil-nut Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the skin from the Brazil nuts and cut them into thin slices.

  2. Place the sliced nuts in a salad bowl, season with salt and sweet paprika, and cover with white wine.

  3. Let them macerate overnight.

  4. Slice the boiled Jerusalem artichokes.

Make the dressing

  1. Drain the wine from the nuts into a clean saucepan and reduce it to one-fourth.

  2. Once cold, mix in the mayonnaise dressing.

Assemble and serve

  1. Combine the artichokes with the nuts and mix in the mayonnaise.

  2. Serve on a nest of shredded lettuce and garnish with capers.

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. Jerusalem artichoke + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Brazil nut + lettucetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together12 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  4. Jerusalem artichoke + lettucetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Brazil nut + caperstop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Brazil nuts
Provide the main body and rich, oily texture of the salad.
Jerusalem artichokes
Add a firm, starchy bite that contrasts with the soft nuts.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds fat and moisture that binds the salad and coats each ingredient.
White wine
Softens the nuts during maceration and flavours them with mild acidity.

The step that matters

Reducing the macerating wine. Reducing concentrates the wine's flavour and sugars while evaporating its alcohol. If it is reduced too far it turns syrupy or bitter, and if added while warm it can thin the mayonnaise, so it must be fully cold before mixing.

Swap the brazil nut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (white wine, jerusalem artichoke, lettuce, capers):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Brazil nutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against white wine, jerusalem artichoke, lettuce, capers. 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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