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French Salad

A salad of blanched endive with fresh herbs, dressed in olive oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Endive and tarragon share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 75 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

French Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the endive

  1. Blanch the endive and wash it thoroughly.

  2. Break the endive into small pieces using your fingers.

  3. Shake the endive dry in a basket or fine cloth.

Assemble and dress

  1. Arrange the endive in a salad bowl.

  2. Finely mince the herbs and sprinkle them over the salad.

  3. Dress the salad with olive oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper just before serving.

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. Endive + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together75 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Tarragon + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

  4. Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Tarragon + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,323 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Endive
Forms the leafy base, providing crisp texture and a mildly bitter flavour.
Fresh herbs
Add aroma and fresh, green flavour to the leaves.
Olive oil
Adds fat and smooth mouthfeel, carrying flavour across the leaves.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the oil.

The step that matters

Dress the salad just before serving. Salt and acid draw water out of delicate leaves through osmosis, so the salad wilts and turns soggy if dressed too early. Dressing at the last moment keeps the endive crisp.

Swap the endive

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits about as well
  3. Lettucefits about as well
  4. Endivethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tarragon, pepper, olive, vinegar. 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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