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Salad

Egg Mayonnaise

A salad of sliced boiled potatoes, hard‑boiled eggs, watercress, and mayonnaise, seasoned with pepper and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and watercress work together. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 170 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Egg Mayonnaise

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the potatoes and quarter the eggs.

Assemble and serve

  1. Arrange them in a dish, sprinkling pepper and salt in between.

  2. Mix pieces of watercress with the eggs.

  3. Pour over the mayonnaise and garnish with more watercress.

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. Potato + watercresstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together170 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Watercress + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together983 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Egg + watercresstop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together638 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  5. Potato + eggtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,978 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Provide the bulk and starchy base that holds the salad together.
Eggs
Add protein-rich body and a soft, creamy texture to the salad.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and moisture, binding the salad and giving it a rich flavour.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, watercress, pepper. 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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