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Salad

Warm Leek Salad with Oil-Cured Olives and Eggs

A warm salad of blanched leeks topped with oil-cured olives, sliced hard-boiled eggs, and olive oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Leek and olive share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 37 recipes. Both carry ethyl butyrate, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Warm Leek Salad with Oil-Cured Olives and Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the leeks

  1. Trim the leeks and slice them lengthwise. Rinse thoroughly to remove any dirt.

  2. In a pot of boiling water, blanch the leeks for 3-4 minutes until tender.

  3. Drain the leeks and place them on a serving platter.

Dress and serve

  1. Chop the oil-cured olives and sprinkle them over the leeks.

  2. Slice the hard-boiled eggs and arrange them on top.

  3. Drizzle with olive oil and season with salt to taste.

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. Leek + olivetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together37 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

  2. Leek + eggtop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together294 recipes

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

  3. Olive + eggtop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,340 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Leeks
Blanching softens the fibrous leeks until tender while keeping their mild flavor.
Oil-cured olives
Add salty, savoury intensity that contrasts with the mild leeks.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add richness and soft, creamy texture to the salad.
Olive oil
Adds fat and smooth richness that carries the flavours of the dish.

The step that matters

Blanch the leeks until tender. Leeks are dense and fibrous, so under-blanching leaves them tough, while over-cooking makes them limp and waterlogged. Timing in boiling water sets the texture the rest of the salad depends on.

Swap the leek

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Leekthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against olive, 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.

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