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Salad

Potato Salad

A salad of cooked potatoes, onion, celery, egg yolk, parsley, and dressing, served on lettuce with beet garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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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 ↓

Potato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Assemble

  1. Layer cooked potato in a dish.

  2. Sprinkle grated onion, chopped celery, pepper, and coarse sea salt over each layer.

  3. Add strained yolk of hard-boiled egg on top.

  4. Sprinkle with chopped parsley.

Dress and serve

  1. Mix with Trench dressing or cooked dressing.

  2. Serve on lettuce leaves and garnish with sliced or shaped beets.

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

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

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

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

  4. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 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

Potatoes
Form the bulk of the salad and absorb the dressing's flavour and moisture.
Trench dressing or cooked dressing
Supplies moisture and tang that coat the potato and bind the salad together.
Hard-boiled egg yolk
Adds richness and a creamy, crumbly texture to the salad.
Onion
Contributes sharp aroma and pungency that mellows as the salad rests.

The step that matters

Mix with the dressing while the potato is still warm. Warm potato absorbs dressing more readily than cold potato, so flavour distributes evenly through the salad instead of sitting on the surface.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, celery, pepper, egg, parsley, lettuce):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, celery, pepper, egg, parsley, lettuce. 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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