Name: Potato Salad
Ingredients: cold boiled potatoes; lettuce; celery; watercress; cabbage; cold boiled beets; green pickles

Why it works: Lettuce and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 307 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Potato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Chop cold boiled potatoes into small square pieces.
Combine with lettuce, celery, watercress, cabbage, cold boiled beets, and green pickles.
Dress the salad as you would any other salad.

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.

Lettuce + watercresstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together307 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Lettuce + cabbagetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together622 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Lettuce + celerytop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Potato + watercresstop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together170 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Celery + cabbagetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,840 recipes

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

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

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, celery, watercress, cabbage):

Beetrootfits better
Turnipfits better
Mustardfits better
Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, celery, watercress, cabbage. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.