Why it works: Egg and lettuce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,301 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓
Egg Salad
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the eggs
Remove the shells from the hard-boiled eggs and cut them lengthwise.
Carefully take out the yolks without breaking the whites.
Fill and serve
Mash the yolks into a paste and moisten with mayonnaise dressing.
Return the yolk mixture to the egg whites, filling them completely.
Prepare a platter with nests made of lettuce leaves and place one egg half in each nest.
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.
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Egg + lettucetop 30% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together3,301 recipes
Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
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 base of the dish, with yolks mashed into a filling and whites serving as containers.
- Mayonnaise dressing
- Moistens the mashed yolks, giving the filling a smooth, creamy texture.
- Lettuce leaves
- Form edible nests that hold the egg halves on the platter.
The step that matters
Carefully take out the yolks without breaking the whites. Egg whites are delicate and tear easily when cooked and handled. Keeping them intact preserves the shape of each half so the filling stays contained and the presentation holds.
“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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