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Cold Meat Salad

A salad of diced cooked meat tossed with olive oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, and optional vegetables and herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 307 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cold Meat Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Cut the meat into small dice.

  2. For each pint of meat, mix ½ cup olive oil, 1 tablespoon vinegar, ½ teaspoon salt, and ¼ teaspoon white pepper to make a French dressing.

  3. Thoroughly coat the meat with the dressing and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.

Dress the vegetables

  1. If using cold vegetables, pour boiling water over them, drain, and coat with French dressing.

Assemble and serve

  1. Arrange lettuce on a platter, top with the meat, and garnish with vegetables.

  2. Add nasturtium leaves or watercress for extra flavor, if desired.

  3. For boiled meat, consider adding onion juice or chopped chives for seasoning.

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. Lettuce + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together307 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Tarragon + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Tarragon + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together108 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  5. Lettuce + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,562 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Meat
Forms the body of the salad and absorbs the dressing as the main component.
Olive oil
Carries fat and flavor through the dressing and keeps the meat moist and rich.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the richness of the oil.

The step that matters

Coat the meat thoroughly and chill it. Oil and vinegar must be worked evenly through the diced meat so every piece is seasoned. Resting it in the cold lets the dressing soak in and firms the fat, so the flavor sits in the meat rather than pooling on the platter.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (meat, olive, tarragon, white pepper, lettuce, watercress):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, olive, tarragon, white pepper, lettuce, watercress. 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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