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Salad

Cress Salad

A salad of watercress, nasturtium leaves and flowers, cress, hard‑boiled eggs, dressed with vinegar, oil, salt, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Cress Salad

Why it works: Watercress and garden cress share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cress Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. In a bowl, mix white wine vinegar, salad oil, salt, and sugar.

Toss the salad

  1. Add sprigs of watercress and leaves of young nasturtiums.

  2. Include enough American or garden cress to fill the bowl.

  3. Toss the salad well and transfer it to a large dish.

Arrange and serve

  1. Arrange nasturtium leaves around the edge, overlapping them.

  2. Create an inner circle with nasturtium flowers and add sliced hard-boiled eggs in the center.

  3. Top with a tuft of flowers and leaves, then serve immediately.

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. Watercress + garden cresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Vinegar + garden cresstop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together31 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Wine + vinegartop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,493 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  4. Vinegar + watercresstop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together465 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

White-wine vinegar
Provides sharp acidity that balances the oil and sugar in the dressing.
Salad oil
Adds fat that carries flavour and gives the dressing a smooth, coating texture.
Moist sugar
Adds a little sweetness that softens the sharpness of the vinegar.
Sliced hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and a mild, creamy contrast to the peppery greens.

Swap the garden cress

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (wine, vinegar, sugar, watercress, egg):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits about as well
  4. Garden cressthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against wine, vinegar, sugar, watercress, egg. 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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