Skip to main content
Salad

Lettuce Salads

A salad of lettuce seasoned with salt, pepper, sweet oil, and vinegar, optionally dressed with hard‑boiled egg yolk, mustard, or mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lettuce and chervil match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 396 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Lettuce Salads

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lettuce

  1. Trim off the outer leaves of the lettuce and wash the heads in cold water.

  2. Trim the leaves and drain them on a salad strainer.

  3. Before using, drain them on a napkin without pressing the leaves.

Dress and serve

  1. Put the leaves in a salad bowl and season with salt, pepper, sweet oil, and vinegar.

  2. Dress the salad only when ready to serve.

  3. For a mustard dressing, mash the yolk of a hard boiled egg in a bowl, dilute with oil and vinegar, and add mustard, salt, and pepper.

  4. Pour the dressing over the lettuce and mix gently with a wooden spoon and fork.

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 + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together396 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lettuce + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,356 recipes

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

  3. Mustard + cherviltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together207 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Mustard + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  5. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 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

Lettuce
Forms the leafy base, and its crispness depends on being dried well before dressing.
Sweet oil
Carries flavour and coats the leaves, giving them a smooth, glossy mouthfeel.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the salad and balances the richness of the oil.

The step that matters

Dress the salad only when ready to serve. Salt and acid draw water out of lettuce leaves, so dressing early makes them limp and soggy. Leaves that are thoroughly dried and dressed at the last moment stay crisp.

Swap the mustard

The recipe marks mustard as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, pepper, vinegar, egg, onion, sugar, chervil):

  1. Chivefits about as well
  2. Mustardthe original
  3. Beetrootfits about as well
  4. Shallotfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, pepper, vinegar, egg, onion, sugar, chervil. 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.

More lettuce salad recipes

Cabbage 14French 9Dressing 7Plain 4Tomato 4Dutch 3 See all 145 →

You might also like

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes