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Russian Salad with Caviare

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 17 ingredients
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Why it works: Beetroot and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 231 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Russian Salad with Caviare

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pack a conical-shaped mold with ice and decorate the inside with anchovy fillets, poached egg whites, gherkins, and preserved French beans, all dipped in a little half-set aspic jelly to make them stick.

  2. Cover with a thin layer of aspic jelly and let it set.

  3. Prepare a salad of boiled beetroots, potatoes, carrots, pickled button mushrooms, capers, salted cucumber, and celery, all cut small.

  4. Add fillets of anchovies or salted herrings, a small piece of cooked fish, and crayfish tails, all cut small.

  5. Mix with enough thick mayonnaise sauce to bind the ingredients.

  6. Pack the mixture into the mold, let it cool in the ice for an hour, then turn it out onto a dish.

  7. Garnish with small rolls cut in halves and filled with caviare.

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. Beetroot + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together231 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beans + beetroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together215 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Beetroot + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together699 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Potato + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,107 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Beans + carrottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,443 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (anchovy, egg, beans, beetroot, potato, mushroom, capers):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Carrotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against anchovy, egg, beans, beetroot, potato, mushroom, capers. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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