Skip to main content
Salad

Lettuce Salad

A salad of cabbage cos lettuce with garden cress, tarragon, chervil, hard‑boiled egg yolks, and a dressing of salad oil, tarragon vinegar, and French mustard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Tarragon and chervil match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 824 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Lettuce Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lettuce

  1. Rinse the cabbage or cos lettuces, then drain and dry thoroughly.

  2. Break the leaves into convenient pieces.

Make the dressing and serve

  1. In a bowl, combine the chopped garden cress, tarragon, chervil, and egg yolks.

  2. Add the salad oil, tarragon vinegar, and French mustard; mix until smooth.

  3. Add the lettuce to the dressing and serve.

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. Tarragon + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together824 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Garden cress + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Garden cress + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together23 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Tarragon + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together901 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Garden cress + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together18 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

Hard-boiled egg yolks
Mashed yolks emulsify with the oil and mustard to form a thick, creamy dressing.
Salad oil
Provides fat that carries flavour and gives the dressing a smooth, glossy body.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the richness of the yolks and oil.
Cabbage or cos lettuces
Forms the crisp leafy base that the dressing coats.

The step that matters

Mix the dressing until smooth. Yolks, oil and vinegar must be blended thoroughly so they emulsify; if the oil is added too fast or not mixed well, the dressing separates and turns greasy rather than creamy.

Swap the cabbage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (garden cress, tarragon, chervil, egg, vinegar, mustard):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against garden cress, tarragon, chervil, egg, vinegar, mustard. 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.

You might also like

Cress SaladCress Salad10 recipesCabbage DressingCabbage Dressing9 recipesChicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipes