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Salad

Dandelion Salad

A salad of young dandelion leaves dressed with a lemon‑flour oil sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Dandelion and lemon share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 57 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Dandelion Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the leaves

  1. Pick young, tender dandelion leaves.

  2. Cleanse them thoroughly.

  3. Place the leaves in salad dishes.

Make the dressing

  1. In a frying pan, heat the olive oil.

  2. Add the flour to the pan and brown the flour.

  3. Stir in the lemon juice, water, and salt, then beat the mixture to a paste.

  4. Pour the dressing over the dandelion leaves.

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. Dandelion + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together57 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Olive + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Dandelion + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together35 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Dandelion + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together54 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptenal (green).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Olive oil
Carries the flavor and coats the leaves, adding richness to the salad.
Flour
Browned in the oil, it thickens the dressing into a paste.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the bitter dandelion leaves.

The step that matters

Browning the flour. Flour browned in hot oil must be stirred constantly; if it scorches it turns bitter and dark, and the dressing loses its pleasant nutty flavor.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (dandelion, olive, flour):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Raisinfits less well
  4. Limefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against dandelion, olive, flour. 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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