Name: Potato Salad
Ingredients: New potatoes or German potatoes; Salt; Pepper; Dressing of your choice; 1 hard-boiled egg; Parsley; Beets (optional); Lettuce (optional); Onions (optional)

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Potato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the potatoes until just tender, then slice them thinly.
Layer the sliced potatoes in a salad dish, lightly covering each layer with dressing.
If using beets, cut them into half-inch dice or thin slices and season with salt and pepper.
Rub the yolk of the hard-boiled egg through a sieve and chop the parsley coarsely.
Alternate layers of potatoes, beets, egg, parsley, and dressing until all ingredients are used.
Reserve some dressing for the top layer and place the egg and parsley on top.
For a decorative touch, arrange potatoes, parsley, and egg in the center, with a circle of beets and lettuce around the edge, then pour dressing over the entire dish.
If desired, add thinly sliced onions in alternate layers with the potatoes.

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.

Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,023 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,483 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Potato + parsleytop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,855 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Potato + lettucetop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together322 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

Swap the lettuce

The recipe marks lettuce as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, pepper, egg, parsley, onion):

Chivefits better
Carrotfits better
Spinachfits better
Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, pepper, egg, parsley, onion. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.