Name: Egg Salad
Ingredients: 6 hard boiled eggs, chilled; ½ bottle capers; a dash of cayenne pepper; salt to taste; White Cream Sauce; parsley; lettuce hearts

Why it works: Capers and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 372 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Egg Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Chop the hard boiled eggs not too fine.
Mix in the capers, cayenne pepper, and salt.

Dress and serve

Toss lightly with White Cream Sauce.
Sprinkle with parsley.
Serve on lettuce hearts.

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.

Capers + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together372 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Capers + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,550 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,483 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Pepper + lettucetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,037 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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 chopped egg giving a soft, creamy texture.
Capers: Add a sharp, briny acidity that cuts through the richness of the eggs and sauce.
White cream sauce: Adds moisture and richness, binding the chopped eggs into a spreadable salad.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, capers, pepper, cream, sauce, parsley):

Shallotfits better
Horseradishfits better
Chivefits better
Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, capers, pepper, cream, sauce, parsley. 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.