Why it works: Egg and lettuce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,301 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓
Egg Salad
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the eggs
Cook the eggs in water just off the boil for 20 minutes, then chill and shell them.
Cut the egg whites into strings and pass the yolks through a potato ricer.
Assemble and serve
Arrange the egg whites on shredded lettuce, making little nests and filling them with the yolks.
Pour French dressing lightly over the nests and serve.
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.
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Egg + lettucetop 30% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together3,301 recipes
Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Eggs
- Provide the main body of the salad, with whites giving structure and yolks giving a rich, creamy texture.
- Shredded lettuce
- Forms a crisp, cool bed that holds the egg nests and adds fresh texture.
- French dressing
- Adds moisture, acidity and savoury flavour to the eggs and lettuce.
The step that matters
Cooking the eggs in water just off the boil. Holding the water just below boiling cooks the eggs gently, so the yolks set without turning dry and grey at the edges. Boiling hard can make the whites rubbery and the yolks chalky.
“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.
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