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Endive Salad

A salad of torn endive dressed with olive oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, and optional herbs, topped with hard‑boiled egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Endive Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Rub a bowl with garlic or a crust of bread.

  2. Tear the endive into bite-sized pieces and place in the bowl.

Dress and serve

  1. Drizzle olive oil and vinegar over the endive.

  2. Season with salt and pepper, then toss gently to combine.

  3. Rub the hard-boiled egg through a wire sieve and sprinkle over the salad.

  4. Add chopped herbs if desired 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. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Olive + garlictop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,665 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  5. Endive + clovetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together59 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

Endive
Forms the crisp, bitter-leaved base of the salad.
Olive oil
Adds fat and carries flavour across the leaves.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the oil.
Hard-boiled egg
Adds richness and a soft, crumbly texture when sieved over the leaves.

The step that matters

Tossing the endive with the dressing. Toss gently so the delicate leaves stay whole and crisp. Bruised leaves wilt and release water, which thins the dressing and dulls the salad.

Swap the clove

The recipe marks clove as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (endive, olive, vinegar, garlic, egg, pepper, onion):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against endive, olive, vinegar, garlic, egg, pepper, onion. 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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