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Salad

Dandelion Salad

A fresh salad of dandelion greens, watercress, and green onions, seasoned with salt and dressed with oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Dandelion and watercress share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Dandelion Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the dandelion greens thoroughly.

  2. Slice the watercress and green onions.

Assemble and serve

  1. In a salad bowl, combine the dandelion, watercress, and sliced onions.

  2. Add salt to taste and serve with oil or dressing.

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. Dandelion + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together20 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Watercress + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together533 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Dandelion + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together52 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

Dandelion greens
Provide the leafy, slightly bitter base of the salad.
Watercress
Adds a peppery bite and crisp, fresh texture to the greens.
Green onions
Add a mild, sharp onion aroma and fresh flavor.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (dandelion, watercress):

  1. Kalefits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against dandelion, watercress. 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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