Name: Ham Salad
Ingredients: 1 cup boiled or fried ham, minced; 4 hard boiled eggs, chopped; 1 teaspoon celery seed; 1 teaspoon mustard seed; 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce; cold mashed potatoes; mayonnaise; minced parsley; lettuce

Why it works: Mustard and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,356 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Ham Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Mince the ham.
Chop the hard-boiled eggs.
In a bowl, combine the ham, eggs, celery seed, mustard seed, and Worcestershire sauce.

Assemble and serve

Make nests with the cold mashed potatoes on a serving plate.
Fill the nests with the ham mixture, heaping it high.
Dress the salad with mayonnaise.
Sprinkle minced parsley on a bed of lettuce.

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 + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,356 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,810 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Celery + mustardtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,169 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,483 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Ham: Provides the savoury, meaty body of the salad.
Hard-boiled eggs: Add soft, creamy texture and bulk to the filling.
Mayonnaise: Adds fat and moisture, binding the filling and making it creamy.
Cold mashed potatoes: Form the base nests that hold the filling and add starchy body.
Worcestershire sauce: Adds savoury, tangy depth that seasons the ham mixture.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, egg, celery, mustard, sauce, parsley, lettuce):

Shallotfits better
Horseradishfits better
Chivefits better
Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, egg, celery, mustard, sauce, parsley, lettuce. 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.