Name: Potato Salad
Ingredients: potatoes; salad dressing; beets; hard-boiled eggs; parsley

Why it works: Potato and parsley are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,855 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Potato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the potatoes until tender, then drain and cut them into dice.
Mix the diced potatoes with salad dressing and pack them into a bowl.
Turn the bowl onto a platter to maintain its shape.
Decorate the molded potato with slices of beet, extending one-third of the way up.
Add slices of hard-boiled egg white to reach one-third of the top.
Cover the remaining mold with the yellow of the hard-boiled egg, pressed through a ricer.
Garnish around the bottom and between each row of decoration with sprigs of parsley.

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 + parsleytop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,855 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Egg + parsleytop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,765 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Potato + eggtop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,978 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).