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Salad

Egg Salad

A salad made from hard-boiled eggs mixed with Parmesan, chives, pepper, sea salt, and butter, served on lettuce with tomatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Chive and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 261 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Egg Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Cut hard-boiled eggs in half lengthwise.

  2. Rub the yolks through a sieve.

  3. Mix yolks with an equal weight of grated Parmesan cheese.

  4. Season with chopped chives, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

  5. Add enough butter to moisten the mixture.

Assemble and serve

  1. Fill the egg whites with the yolk mixture.

  2. Serve on a bed of lettuce and garnish with sliced tomatoes.

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. Chive + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together261 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lettuce + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,655 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  4. Parmesan cheese + buttertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,163 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Parmesan cheese + tomatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,490 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

Hard-boiled eggs
Provide the whites that hold the filling and the yolks that form its base.
Parmesan cheese
Adds savory, salty flavor and firmness to the yolk mixture.
Butter
Adds fat and moisture so the yolk mixture becomes smooth and spreadable.

The step that matters

Add enough butter to moisten the mixture. Yolks crumble easily when dry, and fat lubricates the starch and protein particles so they bind into a smooth, spreadable filling. Adding butter gradually lets you stop once the texture is right, avoiding a greasy result.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, parmesan cheese, chive, pepper, butter, lettuce):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, parmesan cheese, chive, pepper, butter, lettuce. 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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