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Chicken Salad

Chicken salad made with boiled chicken, celery, mayonnaise, and garnished with lemon, hard‑boiled eggs, capers, olives, and sweet Spanish peppers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Chicken Salad

Why it works: Lettuce and capers 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 ↓

Chicken Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

  1. Boil the chicken until tender, then let it cool.

  2. Remove the meat from the bones, discarding fat, gristle, and skin.

  3. Cut the meat into small cubes, preferably using only the white meat.

Make the salad

  1. In a bowl, combine the chicken and celery, mixing thoroughly.

  2. Sprinkle with salt and a few drops of lemon juice, then chill on ice.

  3. Prepare mayonnaise dressing as per your preferred recipe.

  4. Just before serving, add the dressing to the salad and mix well.

Serve

  1. Serve a spoonful of salad on a lettuce leaf, topped with a teaspoon of mayonnaise.

  2. Garnish with lemon, sliced hard boiled eggs, capers, olives, or sweet Spanish peppers.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + caperstop 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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Chicken
Provides the main protein and the bulk of the salad's texture.
Celery
Adds crisp crunch that contrasts with the soft chicken and dressing.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds fat and moisture, binding the salad and giving it a creamy texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the rich dressing.

The step that matters

Add the dressing just before serving. Mayonnaise thins and can separate or weep liquid when held with moist chicken and celery, so dressing too early makes the salad soggy and loose.

Swap the celery

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, lemon, lettuce, egg, capers, olive, pepper. 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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