Name: Egg Salad
Ingredients: 1 head of lettuce, small crisp leaves; 4 hard-boiled eggs, sliced; 12 capers, minced; plain dressing

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 ↓

Egg Salad

Ingredients

1 head of lettuce, small crisp leaves
4 hard-boiled eggs, sliced
12 capers, minced
plain dressing

Directions

Place the small crisp leaves of lettuce in a salad bowl.
Add the sliced hard-boiled eggs on top.
Sprinkle the minced capers over the eggs.
Drizzle with plain dressing and serve.

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 + caperstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together372 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Egg + caperstop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,311 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).
Lettuce + eggtop 30% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked 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

Lettuce: Provides crisp texture and bulk as the base of the salad.
Hard-boiled eggs: Add rich, soft texture and substance to the crisp leaves.
Capers: Add sharp, salty acidity that cuts through the richness of the eggs.
Plain dressing: Adds moisture and fat that coat the leaves and eggs.