Skip to main content
Salad

Fish or Cheese Salad

A salad of chopped fish and grated cheese mixed with butter, mustard, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mustard and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,169 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Fish or Cheese Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. Rub the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs into a paste with the melted butter.

  2. Add the salt, pepper, sugar, and mustard to the egg mixture.

Combine the salad

  1. Stir in the grated cheese and chopped fish until well combined.

  2. Finally, mix in the vinegar, celery seed, and minced onion.

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. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Mustard + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  4. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Cheese + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Fish
Provides the main body and flavour of the salad.
Cheese
Adds richness and body, binding the salad together.
Hard-boiled eggs
Yolks form a creamy paste that carries the dressing.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the egg paste.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the salad and balances the richness.
Mustard
Adds sharpness and a pungent flavour to the dressing.

The step that matters

Mixing the yolks into a paste with butter. Yolks must be worked smooth with the melted butter before other ingredients are added; otherwise lumps of yolk stay unevenly distributed through the salad.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (fish, cheese, butter, pepper, sugar, mustard, celery):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against fish, cheese, butter, pepper, sugar, mustard, celery. 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.

You might also like

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes