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Lettuce Salad

A salad of shredded cabbage lettuce with hard‑boiled eggs, dressed with tarragon vinegar, salad oil, salt, pepper, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 425 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lettuce Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the salad

  1. Trim, wash, and dry the lettuce thoroughly.

  2. Tear the lettuce into shreds and place it in a salad bowl.

Dress and serve

  1. In a small bowl, combine 2 teaspoons of coarse sea salt and 1 teaspoon of black pepper.

  2. Fill the bowl with tarragon vinegar and stir until the salt is dissolved.

  3. Pour the vinegar mixture over the salad.

  4. Add the salad oil and mix the salad thoroughly.

  5. Cut the hard-boiled eggs into quarters and place them on top of the salad.

  6. Sprinkle the chopped parsley over the salad 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. Lettuce + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Tarragon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Cabbage + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together622 recipes

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

  5. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Cabbage lettuce
Forms the crisp, leafy base of the salad.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and creamy texture on top of the salad.
Salad oil
Adds fat and carries flavour, coating the leaves lightly.
Tarragon vinegar
Adds acidity and a sharp, aromatic bite that balances the oil.

The step that matters

Drying the lettuce thoroughly. Wet leaves dilute the dressing and make it slide off, so the oil and vinegar do not cling. Dry leaves let the dressing coat them evenly.

Swap the cabbage

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, egg, tarragon, vinegar, parsley, pepper. 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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