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Potato Salad

A chilled salad of boiled potato slices with onion, parsley, salt, pepper, dressing, and optional stock, served on lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Potato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the salad

  1. Slice the hot boiled potatoes.

  2. Add chopped onion, parsley, salt, and pepper.

  3. Pour a generous amount of plain salad dressing over the potatoes.

  4. If the mixture is too dry, add a little hot water or soup stock.

  5. Toss gently to avoid breaking the potato slices.

Chill and serve

  1. Chill the salad on ice until cold.

  2. Serve on lettuce leaves, adding two tablespoons of potato salad to each plate.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Potato + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

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

  5. Potato + lettucetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together322 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

Boiled potatoes
Form the bulk of the salad, with starch that holds the dressing and gives body.
Plain salad dressing
Supplies moisture, fat and tang that season and coat the potato slices.
Hot water or soup stock
Adds moisture to loosen a dry mixture without making it watery.

The step that matters

Toss gently. Potato slices are fragile and break easily when stirred hard. Gentle folding keeps them intact and the salad looking neat, while still coating them with dressing.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, onion, parsley, pepper, butter):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, onion, parsley, pepper, butter. 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.

More potato salad recipes

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