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Salad

Hungarian Salad

A salad of cooked vegetables dressed with a lemony egg yolk vinaigrette.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Hungarian Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Arrange cooked vegetables in a dish, using a variety for best results.

  2. Season the vegetables lightly with salt and pepper.

  3. Drizzle with oil and lemon juice.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In a saucepan, combine egg yolks, vinegar, meat stock (or water), salt, and pepper.

  2. Cook the mixture gently, then slowly whisk in the oil until emulsified.

  3. Pour the sauce over the vegetables, using about ½ cup of sauce for a pint of vegetables.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Pepper + meattop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,777 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + vinegartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,334 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Lemon and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Emulsify the oil into the sauce and thicken it as they cook gently.
Oil
Adds richness and body by forming an emulsion with the egg yolks.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour of the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds bright acidity that lifts the flavour of the vegetables.

The step that matters

Cook the yolk mixture gently, then whisk in the oil slowly. Egg yolks scramble if they get too hot, and oil added too fast can fail to emulsify. Gentle heat and slow addition let the yolks thicken and hold the oil in a smooth sauce.

“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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