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Mayonnaise Dressing

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 ↓

Mayonnaise Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Use all white meat, all dark meat, or a mix of both chicken.

  2. If celery is scarce, substitute with apple, white cabbage, potato, or shredded lettuce.

  3. Cut chicken and celery into dice in equal parts and marinate the chicken.

  4. Keep the marinated chicken in a cold place until ready to use.

  5. Mix the chicken and celery lightly with mayonnaise.

  6. Heap the mixture high in the center of a dish.

  7. Garnish with hard-boiled eggs, pickles, capers, celery tips, lettuce, or olives.

  8. Place additional mayonnaise over the top.

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. Capers + olivetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,688 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Lettuce + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Swap the celery

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

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against meat, chicken, egg, capers, lettuce, olive. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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