Name: Potato Salad
Ingredients: 2 cups boiled potatoes; ½ teaspoon parsley; ¼ teaspoon salt; French dressing

Why it works: Potato and parsley are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,855 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Potato Salad

Ingredients

2 cups boiled potatoes
½ teaspoon parsley
¼ teaspoon salt
French dressing

Directions

Prepare

Cut the potatoes into thin slices or dice.
Rub the inside of the salad bowl with a piece of onion.
Add salt to the potatoes.

Assemble

Layer the potatoes and parsley alternately in the bowl, moistening each layer with French dressing.

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.

Potato + parsleytop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,855 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Boiled potatoes: Form the bulk of the salad and soak up the dressing as the main body of the dish.
Parsley: Adds fresh, herbal aroma that brightens the mild potatoes.
French dressing: Adds moisture and tangy flavor, seasoning each layer of potatoes as it is applied.

“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.