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Salad

Vegetable Salad

A salad of boiled potatoes, French peas, French beans, celery, and mayonnaise served on lettuce leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 500 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Vegetable Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the potatoes until tender, then let them cool and cut into dice.

  2. Drain the French peas and French beans.

  3. Finely chop the celery.

  4. Season the vegetables with salt and pepper.

Assemble and serve

  1. One hour before serving, mix the salad with mayonnaise dressing.

  2. When ready to serve, place the salad on lettuce leaves and add a spoonful of mayonnaise on each portion.

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. Beans + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together500 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  4. Potato + beanstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together655 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Peas + beanstop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together949 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Form the bulk of the salad, holding their diced shape when cooked until tender.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds moisture and richness, binding the vegetables together with fat.
Celery
Adds crisp texture that contrasts with the soft cooked vegetables.

The step that matters

Boil the potatoes until tender, then let them cool before dicing. Potatoes cut while hot are fragile and crumble, and they can turn mushy when mixed with dressing. Cooling firms the starch so the dice keep their shape and hold up in the salad.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, beans, celery, pepper, lettuce):

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Black-eyed peafits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, beans, celery, pepper, lettuce. 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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