Name: Egg Salad
Ingredients: eggs; lettuce leaves; boiled dressing; cottage cheese

Why it works: Egg and cottage cheese work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 601 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Egg Salad

Ingredients

eggs
lettuce leaves
boiled dressing
cottage cheese

Directions

Boil the eggs for 20 minutes.
Once cooled, shell the eggs and carefully separate the whites from the yolks.
Chop the egg whites and leave the yolks whole.
Serve the chopped whites and whole yolks on lettuce leaves with boiled dressing and small balls of cottage cheese.

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 + cottage cheesetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together601 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Lettuce + cottage cheesetop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Egg + lettucetop 30% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,301 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).