Name: French Chicken Salad
Ingredients: remains of cold roast or boiled chicken; lettuces; a little endive; 1 cucumber; slices of boiled beetroot; salad dressing; 1 hard boiled egg; salt

Why it works: Lettuce and endive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 284 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

French Chicken Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Remove the gills from the chicken and slice the lettuces.

Assemble and garnish

Place the lettuces in the center of a dish.
Top with pieces of chicken and pour salad dressing over it.
Garnish the edge with boiled egg cut in rings, sliced cucumber, and sliced beetroot.
Alternatively, rub the yolks through a sieve and chop the whites finely, arranging them on the salad in small bunches, yellow and white alternately.

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.

Lettuce + endivetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together284 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Lettuce + beetroottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together678 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Endive + beetroottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together132 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Lettuce + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,409 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Endive + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together87 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

Lettuces: Forms the crisp bed that holds the other components.
Chicken: Provides the substantial protein base of the salad.
Salad dressing: Adds moisture and flavor that coats the leaves and chicken.
Hard boiled egg: Adds richness and texture through its yolk and white.

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, lettuce, endive, beetroot, egg):

Spinachfits better
Chivefits better
Leekfits better
Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, lettuce, endive, beetroot, egg. 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.