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An English Summer Salad and Salad-Sauce

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Sorrel and beetroot share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 64 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

An English Summer Salad and Salad-Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Gather fresh salad herbs like cress, mustard, celery, sorrel, onions, cucumbers, tomatoes, radish leaves, and baked beetroot.

  2. Wash and prepare the herbs, ensuring they are young and tender.

  3. Combine the herbs in a large bowl.

  4. Dress the salad just before serving to maintain freshness and appearance.

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. Sorrel + beetroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sorrel + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together119 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cucumber + radishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together212 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Mustard + radishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together297 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Cucumber + beetroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mustard, celery, sorrel, onion, cucumber, radish, beetroot):

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mustard, celery, sorrel, onion, cucumber, radish, beetroot. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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