Name: Egg Salad
Ingredients: 8 hard-boiled eggs; salad greens; thick mayonnaise sauce

Why it works: Egg and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 39% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,895 recipes. The science ↓

Egg Salad

Ingredients

8 hard-boiled eggs
salad greens
thick mayonnaise sauce

Directions

Prepare

Chop the yolks and whites of the hard-boiled eggs separately.

Assemble

Place a layer of salad greens in a dish.
Layer the chopped egg whites and yolks over the salad greens.
Make a hole in the center and pour in the thick mayonnaise sauce.

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.

Egg + saucetop 39% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together10,895 recipes

Egg and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,895 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 whites and yolks adding contrasting textures.
Thick mayonnaise sauce: Adds fat and moisture, binding the dish and giving it a creamy richness.
Salad greens: Provide a crisp, fresh base that contrasts with the soft egg and rich sauce.

“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.