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Egg Salad

A salad of hard‑cooked eggs mixed with butter, vinegar, salt, cayenne, and mayonnaise, served on lettuce leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Vinegar and lettuce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,370 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Egg Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs

  1. Remove the shells from the eggs and cut each egg in half.

  2. Take out the yolks and rub them through a fine sieve.

Make the filling

  1. Add melted butter, vinegar, salt, and cayenne to the yolks; mix thoroughly.

  2. Fill the halved egg whites with the yolk mixture.

Serve

  1. Serve on lettuce leaves and add a little mayonnaise on each half.

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. Vinegar + lettucetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,370 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Butter + vinegartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,513 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  4. Butter + lettucetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,287 recipes

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

  5. Egg + lettucetop 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

Hard cooked eggs
Provide the yolks for the filling and the whites that hold it.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy texture to the yolk mixture.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the rich yolks.
Mayonnaise
Adds moisture and a creamy finish on top of each half.

The step that matters

Rubbing the yolks through a fine sieve. Pushing cooked yolks through a fine sieve breaks up lumps and yields a smooth, even texture. Skipping this leaves a grainy filling that is harder to mix with the butter and vinegar.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, butter, vinegar):

  1. Cucumberfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, vinegar. 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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