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Salad

French Salad

A salad of blanched endive dressed with olive oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, and fresh herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Endive and tarragon share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 75 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

French Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the endive

  1. Blanch the endive and wash it thoroughly.

  2. Break the endive into small pieces using your fingers.

  3. Shake the endive dry in a basket or fine cloth.

Assemble and dress

  1. Arrange the endive in a salad bowl.

  2. Sprinkle minced herbs over the salad.

  3. Add salt, pepper, olive oil, and vinegar just before serving.

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. Endive + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together75 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Tarragon + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Endive + olivetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together209 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Tarragon + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,323 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Endive
Forms the crisp, slightly bitter leaves that make up the body of the salad.
Fresh herbs
Add aroma and fresh flavor to the leaves.
Olive oil
Adds fat and smoothness to the dressing, carrying flavor across the leaves.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the bitterness of the endive.

The step that matters

Shake the endive dry. Leftover water dilutes the dressing and makes it slide off the leaves, so the salad tastes watery. Thoroughly dry leaves hold dressing evenly.

Swap the endive

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits about as well
  3. Lettucefits about as well
  4. Endivethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tarragon, pepper, olive, vinegar. 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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