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Salad

French Potato Salad

A potato salad with pepper, salt, chives, parsley, shallots, mustard vinaigrette, and garnished with pickled gherkins, olives, and beetroot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Chive and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 450 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

French Potato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the potatoes

  1. Boil or steam the potatoes in their jackets until tender.

  2. Peel and slice the potatoes while warm.

Dress and serve

  1. Layer the potato slices in a salad bowl, seasoning each layer with pepper, salt, chives, parsley, and shallots.

  2. In a bowl, mix the oil, vinegar, and mustard.

  3. Pour the dressing over the salad and stir gently with a wooden fork and spoon.

  4. Garnish with sliced pickled gherkins, olives, and pickled beetroot before serving.

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. Chive + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Shallot + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together859 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Chive + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together587 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Small round potatoes
Form the body of the salad, holding their shape when sliced while warm.
Oil
Carries flavour and gives the dressing a smooth, rich mouthfeel.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the oil.
French mustard
Adds sharpness and helps the oil and vinegar emulsify into the dressing.

The step that matters

Dress the potatoes while warm. Warm potato slices absorb the oil and vinegar dressing more readily than cold ones, so the flavour penetrates rather than sitting on the surface.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, chive, parsley, shallot, vinegar, mustard, olive):

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Kalefits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, chive, parsley, shallot, vinegar, mustard, olive. 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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