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Chicken Salad

A salad of cubed chicken mixed with French dressing, celery, mayonnaise, and garnished with lettuce, capers, and hard‑cooked egg yolks.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Chicken Salad

Why it works: Lettuce and capers 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 ↓

Chicken Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the cold boiled or roast chicken into ½ inch cubes.

  2. Marinate the chicken with French Dressing.

Assemble and serve

  1. Just before serving, add an equal quantity of small pieces of celery.

  2. Mix with Cream or Mayonnaise Dressing No. 1 or No. 2.

  3. Garnish with lettuce or celery tips, capers, and yolks of hard cooked eggs.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Lettuce + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together372 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Celery + caperstop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together405 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Chicken + lettucetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,421 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Forms the bulk of the salad and provides its main texture and protein.
Celery
Adds crisp texture and a fresh, lightly bitter crunch against the soft chicken.
Cream or mayonnaise dressing
Adds fat and moisture, binding the chicken and celery into a creamy salad.
Yolks of hard cooked eggs
Add richness and a crumbly, creamy texture as a garnish.

The step that matters

Add the celery just before serving. Celery releases water and loses its crispness when it sits in dressing, so adding it late keeps the salad crunchy and stops it from becoming soggy.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, cream, lettuce, capers, egg):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, cream, lettuce, capers, 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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