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Chicken or Turkey Salad

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,033 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Chicken or Turkey Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cut the cooked chicken or turkey into small dice and chill in the refrigerator for 2 hours.

  2. Mix the diced meat with chopped celery and chopped hard-boiled eggs.

  3. Arrange the mixture on a serving plate and pour a generous amount of mayonnaise or dressing over it.

  4. Garnish with celery tips and olives.

  5. Optionally, use lettuce instead of celery and add celery salt or seed to the dressing.

  6. Alternatively, mix the dressing with the meat and celery and let it chill in the refrigerator 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. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Chicken + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,888 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid hexyl ester (sweet, green).

  4. Celery + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,667 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Chicken + celerytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,375 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

Swap the celery

The recipe marks celery as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, egg, olive, lettuce):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, egg, olive, lettuce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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