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Salad

Winter Salad

A salad of cooked beetroot or carrot, celery, potatoes, watercress, hard‑boiled egg, dressed with olive oil, vinegar, mustard, sugar, salt, pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Beetroot and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 143 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Winter Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Peel the cooked beetroot or carrot, being careful not to pierce the skin.

  2. Wash, dry, and slice the celery.

  3. Wash and dry the watercress lightly; separate it into sprigs, cutting off the thick stalks.

  4. In a dish or bowl, mix the beetroot, celery, potatoes, and watercress carefully.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, separate the egg white from the yolk and chop the white finely.

  2. In a bowl, rub the yolk, sugar, salt, pepper, and mustard together smoothly with a wooden spoon.

  3. Gradually stir in the olive oil and vinegar, then add the chopped onion or parsley.

Assemble

  1. Pour the sauce over the salad and sprinkle the chopped egg white on top.

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. Beetroot + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together143 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beetroot + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together184 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Watercress + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together108 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together456 recipes

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

  5. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolk
Its fat and lecithin emulsify the oil and vinegar into a smooth, thick sauce.
Olive oil
Provides fat and richness, carrying flavour through the salad and coating the vegetables.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the sauce and balances the richness of the oil and yolk.
Mustard
Its compounds help stabilise the emulsion and add a sharp, savoury bite.
Potatoes
Provide starchy body, so the salad feels substantial rather than just leafy.
Beetroot or carrot
Adds sweetness, colour and earthy flavour to the salad.

The step that matters

Gradually stir in the olive oil and vinegar. Adding the oil slowly while stirring lets the egg yolk and mustard form a stable emulsion. Pouring it in all at once can split the sauce into separate oil and liquid.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beetroot, celery, potato, watercress, egg, olive, tarragon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against beetroot, celery, potato, watercress, egg, olive, tarragon. 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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