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Salad

Potato Salad with Mayonnaise

A chilled potato salad flavored with onion juice, parsley, French dressing, mayonnaise, capers, and hard‑boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 372 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Potato Salad with Mayonnaise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Boil the potatoes.

  2. Let the potatoes cool without peeling.

  3. Remove the skins.

  4. Cut the potatoes into slices, balls, or cubes.

Season and marinate

  1. Squeeze a little onion juice over the potatoes.

  2. Sprinkle the potatoes with chopped parsley.

  3. Let the potatoes marinate in French dressing for several hours.

Assemble and serve

  1. Create nests with lettuce leaves and place a spoonful of potato in each.

  2. Top each serving with a teaspoon of mayonnaise.

  3. Sprinkle each serving with capers.

  4. Press a quarter of a hard-boiled egg into the mayonnaise.

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. Lettuce + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together372 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

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

  5. 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

Potatoes
Form the bulk of the salad and hold their shape when cut and cooled.
French dressing
Its oil and acid flavour the potatoes as they marinate.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and creaminess, giving the salad its moist, rich texture.
Hard-boiled eggs
Add firm, mild richness and a contrasting texture to the salad.

The step that matters

Let the potatoes cool without peeling. Cooling cooked potatoes before cutting helps them keep their shape, and leaving the skins on during cooling limits water loss and sogginess. Cutting warm potatoes tends to make them crumble and absorb dressing unevenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, parsley, lettuce, capers, egg):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, parsley, lettuce, capers, egg. 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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