Name: Marguerite Salad
Ingredients: 6 hard boiled eggs; mayonnaise dressing; lettuce leaves

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 ↓

Marguerite Salad

Ingredients

6 hard boiled eggs
mayonnaise dressing
lettuce leaves

Directions

Prepare

Rub the yolks of the hard boiled eggs through a sieve.
Chop the whites finely.
Moisten the chopped whites with mayonnaise dressing.

Assemble

Make cups with the lettuce leaves.
In each cup, place 1 teaspoon of the yolks and surround them with the chopped whites.

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.

Egg + lettucetop 30% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked 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

Hard boiled eggs: Provide the main body of the salad, with yolks and whites giving contrasting textures.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds moisture and richness, binding the chopped whites and giving them a creamy coating.
Lettuce leaves: Form edible cups that hold the egg portions and add a crisp, fresh base.

“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.