Name: Egg Salad
Ingredients: hard-cooked eggs; watercress; chives; French dressing

Why it works: Watercress and chive share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 97 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Egg Salad

Ingredients

hard-cooked eggs
watercress
chives
French dressing

Directions

Slice the hard-cooked eggs.
Arrange the slices on a bed of watercress.
Sprinkle finely chopped chives over the eggs.
Drizzle with French dressing.

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.

Watercress + chivetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together97 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Egg + chivetop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,624 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Egg + watercresstop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together638 recipes

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