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Salad

Winter Salad

A salad of beetroot or carrot, celery, potatoes, watercress, onion or parsley, and hard‑boiled egg, dressed with olive oil, vinegar, mustard, sugar, salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Beetroot and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 143 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Winter Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Peel the beetroot after cooking, taking care not to pierce the skin before cooking to retain its color.

  2. Wash, dry, and slice the celery.

  3. Wash and dry the watercress lightly.

  4. Separate the watercress into sprigs, cutting off the thick stalks.

  5. In a bowl, mix all the vegetables except the onion or parsley.

Make the sauce

  1. For the sauce, chop the yolk of the hard-boiled egg finely.

  2. In a bowl, rub the yolk, sugar, salt, pepper, and mustard together smoothly with a wooden spoon.

  3. Gradually stir in the olive oil, then the vinegar, and add the onion or parsley.

Assemble and serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the salad and sprinkle the chopped egg white on top.

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 + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together143 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Beetroot + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together184 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Watercress + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together108 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Celery + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together456 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard-boiled egg yolk
Its yolk, rubbed smooth with mustard and sugar, emulsifies the oil and vinegar into a thick, creamy dressing.
Olive oil
Provides fat and richness, carrying the flavour of the sauce and coating the vegetables.
Tarragon or plain vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the sauce and balances the sweetness and richness.
Prepared mustard
Acts as an additional emulsifier and adds sharp flavour that helps hold the sauce together.
Beetroot or carrot
Provides earthy sweetness, colour and body to the salad.
Potatoes
Add starch and bulk, giving the salad a substantial, soft texture.

The step that matters

Rubbing the yolk smooth with the seasonings. The yolk must be worked into a smooth paste before oil is added. Adding oil gradually lets the yolk's lecithin emulsify it into a stable sauce; lumps or rushing can cause the dressing to separate.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beetroot, celery, potato, watercress, egg, olive, tarragon):

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beetroot, celery, potato, watercress, egg, olive, tarragon. 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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