Name: Vegetable Salad
Ingredients: 4 potatoes; an equal amount of another vegetable (cucumbers, beets, string beans, peas, or any other); 2 ounces of oil or bacon fat; coarse sea salt (to taste)

Why it works: Potato and cucumber match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 481 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Vegetable Salad

Ingredients

4 potatoes
an equal amount of another vegetable (cucumbers, beets, string beans, peas, or any other)
2 ounces of oil or bacon fat
coarse sea salt (to taste)

Directions

Prepare

Boil the potatoes until tender, then peel and chop them.
Chop the other vegetable of your choice.

Assemble and serve

In a bowl, combine the potatoes and the chopped vegetable.
Drizzle with oil or bacon fat and season with coarse sea salt.
Toss gently to combine and serve.

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.

Potato + cucumbertop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together481 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes: Provide the starchy base that becomes tender when boiled and holds the salad together.
Oil or bacon fat: Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and coating the vegetables.

“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.