Name: Marguerite Salad
Ingredients: 6 eggs; boiled dressing or mayonnaise; lettuce leaves

Why it works: Egg and lettuce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,301 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Marguerite Salad

Ingredients

6 eggs
boiled dressing or mayonnaise
lettuce leaves

Directions

Prepare the eggs

Boil the eggs for 20 minutes.
Rub the yolks through a sieve and chop the whites finely.

Assemble

Moisten the yolks with boiled dressing or mayonnaise.
Place 1 teaspoon of yolks in each lettuce leaf cup.
Surround the yolks with the chopped whites.

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 + lettucetop 30% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,301 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs: Provide the main body of the salad, with yolks giving richness and whites giving bulk and a mild texture.
Boiled dressing or mayonnaise: Adds fat and moisture, binding the crumbled yolks into a smooth, spreadable filling.

“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.