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Potato Salad

A chilled potato and fish salad dressed with olive oil, caper vinegar, capers, onions, garlic, lemon, and seasoned with salt and Nepal pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Potato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the salad

  1. Mash the cold potatoes in a bowl.

  2. Mix in the cold fish.

  3. Add olive oil, caper vinegar, chopped capers, chopped onions, garlic, lemon rind, and lemon juice.

  4. Season with salt and Nepal pepper, then mix thoroughly.

Serve and garnish

  1. Serve in a glass dish, smoothing the top with a fork.

  2. Garnish with chopped hard-boiled egg and arrange West Indian pickles for decoration.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Olive + garlictop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,665 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Olive + caperstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,688 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

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

  5. Potato + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,517 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Form the bulk and body of the salad as they are mashed.
Olive oil
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and giving the salad a smooth texture.
Capers
Add a sharp, briny bite that brightens the dressing.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that balances the richness and sharpens the flavours.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, fish, olive, vinegar, capers, onion, garlic):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, fish, olive, vinegar, capers, onion, garlic. 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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