Name: Potato Salad
Ingredients: potatoes; 1 clove garlic; 10 leaves mustard; 1 green pepper; 3 sprigs parsley; 2 hard-cooked eggs; French dressing

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Potato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Boil peeled potatoes in water used for cooking tongue or corned beef.
Rub a bowl with the garlic.
Add mustard leaves, chopped green pepper, and parsley to the bowl for each quart of potato cubes.
Chop the hard-cooked eggs and add them to the mixture.
Pour in a good amount of French dressing and mix well.

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.

Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Potato + garlictop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,517 recipes

Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).
Garlic + parsleytop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,308 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Potato + parsleytop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,855 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together17,451 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, garlic, mustard, pepper, parsley, egg):

Dillfits better
Thymefits better
Capersfits better
Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, garlic, mustard, pepper, parsley, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.