Name: Egg Salad
Ingredients: 6 eggs; lettuce leaves; 1 tablespoon chopped chives; 1 tablespoon chopped parsley; plain French dressing; curly parsley for garnish

Why it works: Lettuce and chive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 261 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Egg Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs

Boil the eggs for 15 minutes.
Transfer the eggs to cold water and remove the shells.

Assemble and serve

Slice the eggs and arrange them on a bed of lettuce leaves, overlapping each slice.
Make a plain French dressing and mix in the chopped chives and parsley.
Pour the dressing over the salad, garnish with curly parsley, and 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.

Lettuce + chivetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together261 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Chive + parsleytop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,150 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,483 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Egg + chivetop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,624 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Egg + parsleytop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,765 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs: Form the main body of the salad and provide its protein-rich, mild filling.
Chives: Add a mild onion-like aroma that brightens the eggs.
Parsley: Adds fresh, herbal aroma and a touch of green flavour to the dressing.
Plain french dressing: Adds moisture and acidity that lightly coat the eggs and lettuce.

Flavor stand-ins for the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, chive, parsley):

Shallotbetter flavor fit
Leekbetter flavor fit
Welsh onionbetter flavor fit
Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, chive, parsley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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.