Name: Faench Salad Dressing
Ingredients: ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; ⅛ teaspoon black pepper; ⅓ cup oil; ⅓ cup additional oil; ⅓ cup tarragon vinegar (or cucumber vinegar)

Why it works: Pepper and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,399 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Faench Salad Dressing

Ingredients

¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt
⅛ teaspoon black pepper
⅓ cup oil
⅓ cup additional oil
⅓ cup tarragon vinegar (or cucumber vinegar)

Directions

Make the dressing

Stir the salt and pepper into a large spoonful of oil until the salt dissolves.
Mix in the additional oil.

Dress and serve

Pour the mixture over the salad.
Toss the salad well.
Add the vinegar.
Mix thoroughly.
Serve immediately.

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.

Pepper + tarragontop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,399 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Oil: Forms the base of the dressing and carries the seasoning and coats the salad leaves.
Tarragon vinegar: Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the richness of the oil.
Coarse sea salt: Seasons the dressing and dissolves into the oil to distribute evenly.

“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.