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Salad

Lettuce Salad

A salad of lettuce and garden cress dressed with a mustard‑egg sauce and tarragon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,356 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Lettuce Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the lettuce and garden cress into convenient pieces.

Make the dressing

  1. In a bowl, combine the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs, dry mustard, pepper, salt, and oil. Mix until smooth.

  2. Add oil and vinegar to the mixture to create a sauce.

  3. Incorporate the tarragon, minced eschalot, and diced egg whites.

Assemble

  1. Combine the sauce with the lettuce and cress using a wooden or bone fork and spoon.

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. Mustard + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,356 recipes

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

  2. Tarragon + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lettuce + garden cresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together15 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Tarragon + garden cresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together23 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Mustard + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together901 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard-boiled egg yolks
Emulsify with the oil to form a smooth, thick sauce.
Oil
Provides fat and body, carrying the flavour of the sauce.
Dry mustard
Adds sharp flavour and helps stabilise the emulsion.
Eschalot
Adds sharp, aromatic onion flavour to the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the oil.
Lettuce
Forms the crisp, tender base that the sauce coats.

The step that matters

Mix the yolks, mustard and oil until smooth. Oil must be added gradually to the egg yolks and mustard so they emulsify. Adding it too fast or unevenly causes the sauce to split and look greasy rather than smooth and creamy.

Swap the garden cress

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, mustard, pepper, tarragon, lettuce, vinegar):

  1. Capersfits about as well
  2. Garden cressthe original
  3. Dillfits about as well
  4. Parsleyfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, mustard, pepper, tarragon, lettuce, vinegar. 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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