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Salad

Sweet Potato Salad

A salad of boiled sweet potatoes, celery, French dressing, vinegar, salt, pepper, olives, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Sweet Potato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Dice the boiled sweet potatoes. Add the chopped celery.

  2. Mix with French dressing, adding more vinegar than usual, and season with salt and pepper to taste.

  3. Garnish with olives and 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.

  1. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Olive + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,649 recipes

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

  5. Sweet potato + parsleytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together180 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet potatoes
Form the bulk of the salad, providing starchy body and a soft, tender texture.
Celery
Adds crisp texture and a fresh, mild vegetal crunch against the soft potato.
French dressing
Coats the potato and celery, supplying moisture, fat and seasoning throughout the salad.
Vinegar
Adds sharpness that balances the sweetness of the potatoes and dressing.

The step that matters

Dress the potatoes while they are still warm. Warm potato pieces absorb dressing and vinegar more readily than cold ones, so the flavour penetrates evenly. Seasoning added after cooling sits on the surface and can taste uneven.

Swap the sweet potato

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

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Sweet potatothe original

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

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