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Salad

Salad

A lettuce salad dressed with best Lucca oil, tarragon vinegar, malt vinegar, and coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the salad

  1. Wash and dry the lettuce leaves thoroughly.

  2. Cut the lettuce into broad shreds and place in a deep salad bowl.

  3. Pour ½ cup of best Lucca oil over the lettuce and mix well using a spoon and fork.

  4. Season with coarse sea salt to taste.

Dress and serve

  1. Add 1 teaspoon of tarragon vinegar and fill the spoon with malt vinegar, then stir briskly.

  2. Serve the salad 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.

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 + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Lettuce + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,370 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Vinegar + malttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together365 recipes

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

  5. Lettuce + malttop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together18 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Lettuce
Forms the crisp, leafy base of the salad.
Lucca oil
Coats the leaves with fat, adding richness and carrying flavour.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds bright acidity and a distinct herbal aroma.
Malt vinegar
Adds sharp acidity and a malty, savoury tang.

The step that matters

Stir briskly after adding the vinegars. Vinegar is acidic and does not mix with oil on its own. Vigorous stirring disperses the vinegar into small droplets so it coats the leaves evenly rather than pooling at the bottom of the bowl, giving a balanced dressing in every bite.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tarragon, vinegar, malt):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Beetrootfits about as well
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tarragon, vinegar, malt. 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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