Skip to main content
Main

Egg Salad

A salad made from hard‑boiled eggs mixed with butter, mustard, vinegar, and optional celery or lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Celery and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Egg Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Cut the hard-boiled eggs in half and remove the yolks, keeping the whites intact.

  2. Rub the yolks until fine and smooth.

  3. Mix the yolks with butter and season with salt.

  4. Add finely chopped celery or lettuce.

  5. Add mustard mixed with vinegar.

  6. Combine the mixture into a smooth paste.

  7. If the mixture is not moist enough, add more vinegar.

Fill and serve

  1. Fill the egg whites with the yolk mixture.

  2. Garnish with parsley or celery tops.

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. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mustard + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,588 recipes

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

  5. Butter + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 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

Egg yolks
Their fat and emulsifying lecithin give the filling its rich, smooth, creamy texture.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the yolk filling softer, richer and smoother.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that cuts the richness of the yolks.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and can loosen a dry filling.
Celery or lettuce
Adds crisp texture and freshness to contrast the soft filling.

The step that matters

Make the yolk mixture smooth before filling. Rubbing the yolks fine and combining them into a smooth paste gives an even, creamy filling. Lumps of dry yolk stay grainy, so adding vinegar gradually to reach a moist, spreadable texture matters.

Swap the celery

The recipe marks celery as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, butter, mustard, vinegar, parsley):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Dillfits better
  4. Celerythe original

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

More egg salad recipes

Dressing 26Anchovy 10Sandwich 8Sardine 6Cold 4Spinach 4 See all 143 →

You might also like

Cream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesCelery StewCelery Stew25 recipesCelery CroquettesCelery Croquettes16 recipesCelery Cream SoupCelery Cream Soup15 recipes