Name: Marguerite Salad
Ingredients: hard boiled eggs; lettuce; salad dressing

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

hard boiled eggs
lettuce
salad dressing

Directions

Prepare

Cut hard boiled eggs into eighths lengthwise.
Separate the yolks from the whites.

Assemble

Arrange the egg whites on a bed of lettuce to form a marguerite shape.
Mix the yolks with salad dressing and place in the center of the egg 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 whites forming the petals and yolks the centre.
Lettuce: Forms the bed that holds the egg whites in place.
Salad dressing: Adds moisture and richness to the yolk filling.

“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.