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Salad

Lettuce Salad

A salad of shredded cabbage lettuce, hard‑boiled eggs, and a dressing of tarragon vinegar, salad oil, salt, pepper, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 425 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lettuce Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lettuce

  1. Trim, wash, and dry the lettuce thoroughly.

  2. Tear the lettuce into shreds and place it in a salad bowl.

Make the dressing

  1. In a small bowl, combine the salt and pepper.

  2. Add the tarragon vinegar and stir until the salt is dissolved.

  3. Pour the vinegar mixture over the salad.

  4. Add the salad oil and mix the salad thoroughly.

Garnish and serve

  1. Cut the hard-boiled eggs into quarters and place them on top of the salad.

  2. Sprinkle the chopped parsley over the salad and serve.

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 + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Tarragon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Cabbage + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together622 recipes

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

  5. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Cabbage lettuce
Forms the crisp, leafy base of the salad.
Salad oil
Adds fat and coats the leaves, giving a smoother mouthfeel and carrying flavor.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the salad and balances the oil.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and body from protein and yolk fat.

The step that matters

Dry the lettuce thoroughly before dressing. Water on the leaves dilutes the vinegar and stops the oil from clinging, so the dressing pools at the bottom of the bowl and the leaves turn limp and watery.

Swap the cabbage

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

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