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Italian Salad

This recipe uses a raw egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Mustard and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,356 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Italian Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the cut-up fowl with mustard, cress, and chopped lettuce.

  2. In a bowl, combine vinegar, salad oil, salt, mustard, hard boiled egg yolks, and raw egg yolk; mix smoothly.

  3. Add tarragon vinegar to the mixture and pour it over the salad.

  4. Garnish with the whites of the eggs arranged in small heaps with grated smoked beef.

  5. Cut the hard boiled eggs into small pieces and mix them with the salad.

  6. For presentation, pile the fowl in the center, pour the salad mixture over it, and create a wall of dressed salad around it, topping with egg whites cut into rings.

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. Mustard + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,356 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Lettuce + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Mustard + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together901 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Vinegar + tarragontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,547 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mustard, vinegar, egg, tarragon, beef):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Horseradishfits about as well
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mustard, vinegar, egg, tarragon, beef. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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