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Salad

Potato Salad with French Dressing

A cold potato salad mixed with French dressing, onions, parsley, and optional pickled vegetables and capers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 145 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Potato Salad with French Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dice the cold boiled potatoes.

  2. Mix the diced potatoes carefully with the chopped onion.

  3. Add the French dressing and mix well.

Chill and serve

  1. Refrigerate for 1 to 2 hours.

  2. Sprinkle with chopped parsley before serving.

  3. Garnish with pickled beets, turnips, carrots, capers, or olives as desired.

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. Turnip + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together145 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + caperstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Parsley + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold boiled potatoes
Form the bulk of the salad; cold, firm potatoes hold their cut shape better when dressed.
Onion
Adds sharp, aromatic flavor that cuts through the richness of the dressing.
French dressing
Supplies oil and acid that moisten the potatoes and carry the seasoning.

The step that matters

Mixing the potatoes with the dressing. Potatoes are fragile when cut and can break down or turn mushy if stirred hard. Gentle folding keeps the pieces intact while the dressing soaks in.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, parsley, turnip, carrot, capers, olive):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, parsley, turnip, carrot, capers, 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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