Name: Egg Salad
Ingredients: 6 hard-boiled eggs; boiled dressing; lettuce leaves; radishes

Why it works: Lettuce and radish share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 58 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Egg Salad

Ingredients

6 hard-boiled eggs
boiled dressing
lettuce leaves
radishes

Directions

Cut the hard-boiled eggs in half without breaking the whites.
Cut the tops of the egg halves into small points.
Remove the yolks, rub them through a sieve, and moisten with boiled dressing.
Refill the egg whites with the yolk mixture.
Arrange the filled egg whites on lettuce leaves.
Garnish with thin slices of radish overlapping each other and whole radishes cut to represent tulips.
To make tulip-shaped radishes, select smooth, firm, red radishes and remove the leaves, leaving 1 inch of stem.
Make seven incisions through the skin of the radishes, nearly to the stem ends, and cut under the sections of skin.
Soak the radishes in cold water for 1 hour before serving.

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.

Lettuce + radishtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together58 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Egg + lettucetop 30% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,301 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Egg + radishtop 33% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together165 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).