Skip to main content
Salad

Water Lily Salad

A salad of hard‑cooked eggs, lettuce, olives, and French dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lettuce and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,483 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Water Lily Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs

  1. Cook the eggs for 30 minutes. Once cold, remove the shells.

  2. While still warm, cut the egg whites lengthwise into 5 or 6 strips to create petals.

  3. Remove the yolks, mash them with a little vinegar and salt, and form into cone-shaped balls.

Assemble the salad

  1. Arrange the petals in the center of crisp lettuce leaves on a glass serving platter.

  2. Place one yolk ball in the center of each lily petal.

  3. Sprinkle chopped parsley over the yolk balls.

  4. Add olives and a few radishes on small leaves to represent buds.

  5. Drizzle with French dressing before serving.

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. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

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

  2. Lettuce + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + olivetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,649 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Olive + vinegartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,297 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  5. Lettuce + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,370 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Whites form the petals and cooked yolks, mashed and shaped, form the centers of the lilies.
Lettuce
Crisp leaves form the base that the lily petals rest on.
French dressing
Adds moisture and tangy flavor over the finished salad.

The step that matters

Cook the eggs for 30 minutes. Once cold, remove the shells.. Overcooked eggs develop a greyish ring around the yolk and a rubbery white, and eggs peeled while still hot tear easily. Cooling them fully before peeling keeps the whites intact for cutting petals.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, parsley, olive, vinegar):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Cucumberfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, parsley, olive, vinegar. 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.

You might also like

Chicken SaladChicken Salad623 recipesSalad DressingSalad Dressing491 recipesTomato SaladTomato Salad179 recipesCold SlawCold Slaw160 recipes