Name: Egg Salad
Ingredients: 6 hard boiled eggs; 1 cup cottage cheese; parsley (for sprinkling); White Cream Sauce (for serving); 1 head of lettuce; ½ cup hot vinegar; ½ cup bacon fat; 4 slices of bacon; paprika (for sprinkling)

Why it works: Parsley and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,483 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Egg Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs and bacon

Chop the hard boiled eggs and mix with cottage cheese.
Crisp the bacon slices in a pan, then chop finely.

Wilt the lettuce

In the same pan, wilt the lettuce with hot vinegar and bacon fat.

Assemble and serve

Layer the wilted lettuce, minced bacon, and chopped eggs alternately.
Lightly sprinkle with parsley.
Serve on a bed of lettuce leaves with White Cream Sauce and a dash of paprika.
Serve hot or cold, as desired.

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.

Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,483 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,787 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Lettuce + vinegartop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,370 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Egg + cottage cheesetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together601 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Cottage cheese + creamtop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together146 recipes

Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

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 and rich flavour of the salad.
Cottage cheese: Adds moisture and creaminess to bind the chopped eggs.
Bacon fat: Carries flavour and helps wilt the lettuce with savoury richness.
Hot vinegar: Softens the lettuce and adds a sharp acidic note.
Bacon: Adds smoky, salty, crisp-textured savoury flavour.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, cottage cheese, cream, sauce, lettuce, vinegar):

Tarragonfits better
Capersfits better
Dillfits about as well
Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, cottage cheese, cream, sauce, lettuce, vinegar. 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.