Name: Chestnut Salad
Ingredients: chestnuts; 2 hard-boiled eggs; lettuce; lemon juice; olive oil; coarse sea salt; a pinch of sugar

Why it works: Chestnut and lettuce share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 64 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Chestnut Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chestnuts

Shell the chestnuts.
Blanch and boil the chestnuts until tender.
Drain and set aside to cool.

Prepare the eggs

Boil two eggs until hard.

Assemble the salad

Arrange lettuce in a salad bowl and top with the chestnuts.
Make a dressing with lemon juice, olive oil, salt, and sugar, and drizzle it over the salad.
Use a small sieve to grate the yolk of the egg over the chestnuts.
Slice the egg white into rings and place on top.

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.

Chestnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together64 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Lettuce + olivetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,580 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Lemon + olivetop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,922 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Chestnut + olivetop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together448 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Lettuce + lemontop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,559 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Chestnuts: Provide the main body of the salad, with a soft, starchy, mildly sweet texture.
Hard-boiled eggs: Add richness and creaminess from the yolks and a mild, savoury protein base.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the fat of the oil.
Olive oil: Carries flavour and gives the dressing a smooth, silky body.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chestnut, egg, lettuce, olive, sugar):

Avocadofits better
Vanillafits better
Cherryfits about as well
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chestnut, egg, lettuce, olive, sugar. 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.