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Salad

Olive and Egg Salad

A salad of hard‑boiled eggs, olives, paprika, mayonnaise, and lettuce, with beet juice for coloring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Olive and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,580 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Olive and Egg Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs

  1. Remove shells from the hard boiled eggs.

  2. Cut the egg whites into fifths lengthwise, removing the yolks.

  3. Curl the egg white petals and tint them with beet juice.

Make and assemble

  1. Mash the yolks into a soft cream and mix in the chopped olives and paprika.

  2. Mold the yolk mixture into balls and return them to the curled egg white petals.

  3. Prick the surface with a fork to roughen it.

  4. Top each with a tablespoon of mayonnaise and set in a nest of crisp 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.

  1. Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

  2. Egg + lettucetop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Egg + olivetop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,340 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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, with whites forming the petals and yolks forming the filling.
Olives
Add salty, briny flavor and a contrasting texture to the mashed yolk filling.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and moisture, giving the yolk mixture a soft, creamy texture.

The step that matters

Mash the yolks into a soft cream. Yolks must be mashed fully smooth before the olives are added; lumps of yolk hold together poorly and make the balls crumble when molded. Mixing evenly also spreads the paprika through the filling.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, olive):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Tomatofits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, olive. 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.

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