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
Boil the eggs until hard, then cool them.
Slice the eggs thinly.
Assemble
Place a layer of lettuce in a salad bowl.
Add the sliced eggs on top of the lettuce.
Cover with a thin layer of mayonnaise or other salad dressing.
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
- Eggs
- Provide the main body of the salad, with protein-rich texture once boiled and sliced.
- Mayonnaise or other salad dressing
- Adds moisture, richness and flavour that binds the sliced eggs together.
The step that matters
Boil the eggs until hard, then cool them. Undercooked egg whites stay soft and yolks stay runny, so they will not slice cleanly. Cooling stops residual cooking and keeps yolks from turning grey-green.
“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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