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Salad

Chicken Salad

A salad made from boiled chicken, lettuce, celery, mayonnaise, and garnished with eggs, capers, olives, and optional anchovies.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Chicken Salad

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 ↓

Chicken Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Boil the chicken in stock for 1 hour until cooked, then let it cool completely.

  2. Bone the chicken and cut it into small pieces.

Assemble the salad

  1. Season the chicken with salt, pepper, vinegar, chopped lettuce, and chopped celery. Mix carefully.

  2. Transfer the mixture to a salad bowl.

  3. Cover with mayonnaise.

  4. Decorate the top with hard-boiled egg rings, capers, olives, and anchovies if desired.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Capers + olivetop 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. Pepper + celerytop 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

Chicken
Provides the main body and protein of the salad, becoming tender when simmered.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and moisture, coating the pieces and giving the salad its creamy texture.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the richness of the mayonnaise.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add a firm, mild texture and richness as a decorative topping.

The step that matters

Let the chicken cool completely before seasoning and mixing. Warm chicken would soften the lettuce and celery and cause the mayonnaise to thin and separate, so the salad would turn watery and lose its texture.

Swap the celery

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

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

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