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Normandy Salad

A salad of green peas, hickory nut meats, capers, and mayonnaise served on lettuce leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Capers and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 372 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Normandy Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Stew the fresh green peas with butter, pepper, and salt until tender, ensuring not to scorch them. Cook until there is a little juice left in the pan.

  2. Mix the cooked peas with hickory nut meats, capers, and a dash of paprika.

  3. Serve the mixture in lettuce leaves topped with mayonnaise.

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. Capers + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together372 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Peas + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,293 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Pepper + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + caperstop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,088 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Peas + caperstop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together97 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh green peas
Form the main body of the salad and provide the tender, sweet vegetable base.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour as the peas stew.
Hickory nut meats
Add crunch and a nutty flavour that contrasts with the soft peas.
Capers
Add a sharp, briny acidity that cuts through the richness of butter and mayonnaise.
Mayonnaise
Adds creamy moisture and richness to the topping.

The step that matters

Stew the peas without scorching. Peas are delicate and their sugars can brown and turn bitter if the heat is too high. Gentle stewing with butter softens them evenly while keeping a little juice in the pan.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, meat, capers, lettuce):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Walnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, meat, capers, lettuce. 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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