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Potato Salad

A salad of boiled potatoes mixed with parsley, onions, celery, radishes, vinegar, olive oil, mayonnaise, and served with lettuce and hard-boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and celery 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 ↓

Potato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the parsley, onions, and celery finely.

  2. Boil the potatoes until tender, then peel and slice them while hot.

  3. Add the chopped ingredients, salt, pepper, and paprika to the potatoes.

  4. Pour heated vinegar and olive oil over the mixture. Mix well with two forks.

  5. Add enough mayonnaise to give the salad a yellow color.

Serve

  1. Serve on a bed of lettuce.

  2. Garnish with hard-boiled eggs and hearts of lettuce.

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. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Parsley + potatotop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,855 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Form the bulk of the salad and soak up the dressing when sliced while hot.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the richness of the dressing.
Olive oil
Adds fat and smooth texture, carrying flavor through the potatoes.
Mayonnaise
Binds the salad with creamy moisture and fat, and adds color.
Celery
Adds crisp texture and a fresh, savory crunch to the salad.

The step that matters

Pour heated vinegar and olive oil over the mixture. Potatoes sliced while hot absorb dressing readily, while cold potatoes stay dry. Mixing gently with forks keeps the slices intact and evenly coated.

Swap the radish

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

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Radishthe original

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