Name: Peanut Salad
Ingredients: ½ cup blanched peanuts, chopped; ½ cup cold mashed peas; 1 teaspoon mustard; ¼ teaspoon salt; ¼ teaspoon paprika; 1 hard-boiled egg yolk, riced; 2 tablespoons chopped parsley; Watercress or lettuce, for serving; Mayonnaise, for serving

Why it works: Mustard and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 293 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Peanut Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Chop the blanched peanuts and mix them with the cold mashed peas.
Add the mustard, salt, and paprika to the mixture and combine well.
Roll the mixture in the riced egg yolk and chopped parsley.
Serve with watercress or lettuce and a side of mayonnaise.

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.

Mustard + watercresstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together293 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Parsley + watercresstop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together469 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Mustard + parsleytop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,588 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Peanut + mustardtop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together102 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Peanut + watercresstop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together15 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Blanched peanuts: Provide the main body and nutty crunch of the salad.
Mashed peas: Add bulk and a soft, moist texture that binds the peanuts.
Mustard: Adds sharp, pungent flavour that cuts through the richness.
Hard-boiled egg yolk: Adds richness and a crumbly, creamy coating texture.

Swap the peanut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peas, mustard, egg, parsley, watercress):

Lentilsfits better
Chestnutfits better
Chickpeafits better
Peanutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peas, mustard, egg, parsley, watercress. 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.