Name: Egg Salad
Ingredients: 4 hard-cooked eggs; ¼ cup olives, finely chopped; ½ cup mayonnaise; Lettuce or watercress for serving

Why it works: Olive and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and 2,580 recipes mention both. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Egg Salad

Ingredients

4 hard-cooked eggs
¼ cup olives, finely chopped
½ cup mayonnaise
Lettuce or watercress for serving

Directions

Prepare

Cut the hard-cooked eggs in half and remove the yolks.
Mix the yolks with the finely chopped olives and mayonnaise.

Assemble and serve

Fill the egg whites with the yolk mixture and shape the tops to resemble whole yolks.
Serve on a bed of lettuce or watercress.

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.

Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together2,580 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Egg + lettucetop 30% of all pairs

Aroma overlaplow

Mentioned together3,301 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Egg + olivetop 31% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together15,340 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: Provide the whites that hold the filling and the yolks that form the creamy base.
Olives: Add a salty, briny flavor that contrasts with the rich yolk filling.
Mayonnaise: Binds the mashed yolks into a smooth, spreadable filling with added fat and moisture.

Flavor stand-ins for the lettuce

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

Capsicumbetter flavor fit
Asparagusbetter flavor fit
Tomatobetter flavor fit
Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, olive. 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.