Name: Egg Salad No. 1
Ingredients: 4 hard-boiled eggs; 1 cup mayonnaise; 4 leaves of lettuce; nasturtium flowers or white chicory leaves for garnish

Why it works: Lettuce and chicory share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 40 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Egg Salad No. 1

Ingredients

4 hard-boiled eggs
1 cup mayonnaise
4 leaves of lettuce
nasturtium flowers or white chicory leaves for garnish

Directions

Cut the hard-boiled eggs into thick slices or quarters using a sharp knife.
Arrange each portion on a leaf of lettuce partially covered with mayonnaise.
Place the lettuce in a circle on a flat dish with the stem of the leaf toward the center.
Garnish the center with a bunch of nasturtium flowers or white chicory leaves.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Lettuce + chicorytop 1% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together40 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Egg + chicorytop 26% of all pairs

Aroma overlaplow

Mentioned together52 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).
Egg + lettucetop 30% of all pairs

Aroma overlaplow

Mentioned together3,301 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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 main body of the salad, with firm whites and rich yolks as the core filling.
Mayonnaise: Adds moisture, richness and fat, coating the egg pieces and lettuce.
Lettuce: Acts as a crisp, cool base that holds the egg portions and adds freshness.

Flavor stand-ins for the lettuce

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

Chivebetter flavor fit
Spinachabout as good a flavor fit
Lettucethe original
Beetrootabout as good a flavor fit

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, chicory. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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.