Name: Peppee and Egg Salad
Ingredients: 4 hard-cooked eggs; 2 medium-sized peppers; 1 tablespoon flour; 2 egg yolks; 1 teaspoon salt; 1 teaspoon mustard; Lettuce for serving

Why it works: Mustard and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 1,356 recipes mention both. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Peppee and Egg Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Boil 2 quarts of water in a kettle.
Carefully drop in the eggs and cover the kettle.
Let the eggs sit in the hot water for 45 minutes, then chill and peel.
Clean the peppers and cut them into long strips or circles.
Arrange the pepper slices and egg slices attractively on a bed of lettuce.
Serve with a cooked salad dressing made from flour, egg yolks, salt, and mustard.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Mustard + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together1,356 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together15,430 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Pepper + lettucetop 9% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together4,037 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Flour + lettucetop 11% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together1,236 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + mustardtop 13% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together5,066 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, pepper, flour, lettuce):

Spinachbetter flavor fit
Beetrootbetter flavor fit
Chiveabout as good a flavor fit
Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, pepper, flour, lettuce. 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).