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Salad

Radishes

A chilled radish salad garnished with watercress and ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip 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 29 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Radishes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the radishes

  1. Wash the radishes in a bowl of water.

  2. Brush off all dirt.

  3. Cut off the tops and ends of the radishes.

  4. Dip them in water again.

  5. Place the radishes in a cloth.

  6. Shake the radishes.

  7. Use three bunches of large radishes or four bunches of small radishes.

Cut and arrange

  1. Trim the stems, leaving two leaves on each radish.

  2. Cut the peel into five or six equal-sized leaves without detaching them.

  3. Soak the cut radishes in cold water until ready to serve.

  4. Arrange the radishes in a circle on a small dish with the green leaves outward.

  5. Arrange them on a dish with watercress garnish.

  6. Sprinkle with chopped ice and serve.

Salt and drain

  1. Peel and slice the radishes.

  2. Sprinkle with salt.

  3. Let them sit for five to six hours.

  4. Drain the radishes.

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. Turnip + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Radish + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + radishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together35 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

Fresh turnip radishes
The main vegetable; its crisp, watery flesh gives the salad its texture and fresh flavour.

The step that matters

Salting and resting the sliced radishes. Salt draws water out of the radish flesh by osmosis, softening it and concentrating flavour. Resting for the full time gives this effect, but leaving the radishes too long can make them limp.

Swap the radish

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

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Kalefits better
  4. Radishthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, 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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