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Salad

Salade De Perdreau

A salad featuring cold roast partridge, lettuce, celery, mayonnaise, truffle, vinaigrette, olives, capers, gherkin, and hard-boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 372 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Salade De Perdreau

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the partridge

  1. Cut the partridge into neat joints, remove the skin and most bones.

  2. Place the meat in a dish, season with pepper and coarse sea salt, and pour the vinaigrette over it. Refrigerate for about an hour.

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Wash the lettuce and celery, remove the green leaves, and shred the white portion. Season the shredded celery lightly.

Assemble and serve

  1. Layer the lettuce, celery, and partridge in a dome shape on a salad bowl.

  2. Mask the salad with stiff mayonnaise.

  3. Decorate with slices of gherkin and truffle.

  4. Garnish with quartered hard-boiled eggs, French olives, and capers, then 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 + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together372 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Olive + caperstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,688 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lettuce + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Lettuce + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 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

Partridge
Provides the main cooked meat, which the vinaigrette seasons and moistens during chilling.
Mayonnaise dressing
Coats the salad with a rich, creamy layer that adds fat and moisture.
Vinaigrette
Adds acidity and herb flavour that penetrates the partridge during its rest in the fridge.
Lettuce
Forms the crisp base layer that gives the salad its structure and fresh texture.
Celery
Adds a crisp, fresh crunch and a mild savoury flavour to the layers.

The step that matters

Refrigerate the partridge in the vinaigrette. Chilling the meat in the acidic vinaigrette for about an hour lets the dressing flavour the meat through and firms it for clean slicing. Skipping or shortening the rest leaves the meat bland and the surface unseasoned.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, egg, truffle, vinegar, pepper, olive, capers):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, egg, truffle, vinegar, pepper, olive, capers. 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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