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Potato Salad

A cold potato salad dressed with oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, herbs, mustard, anchovy essence, and hard‑boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Chive and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 587 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Potato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the salad

  1. Slice cold potatoes and dress them with oil, vinegar, coarse sea salt, and black pepper.

  2. Add chopped chives or onion and parsley.

  3. If oil is not agreeable, use cream or melted butter.

Make the poet's salad

  1. For the poet's salad, pass two boiled potatoes through a sieve.

  2. Mix in mustard, salt, essence of anchovy, finely chopped onions, oil, vinegar, and pounded yolks of two hard boiled eggs.

  3. Stir thoroughly before serving.

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. Chive + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together587 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Potato + chivetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together611 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Chive + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Chive + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,907 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold potatoes
Form the body of the salad and absorb the dressing.
Oil
Adds richness and carries flavour through the salad.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the fat.
Hard boiled eggs
Pounded yolks enrich and thicken the dressing.
Mustard
Adds sharpness and helps emulsify the dressing.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, vinegar, pepper, chive, parsley, mustard, anchovy):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, vinegar, pepper, chive, parsley, mustard, anchovy. 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.

More potato salad recipes

German 31Hot 19Dressing 17Anchovy 15French 10American 9 See all 504 →

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