Name: Egg Salad
Ingredients: hard boiled eggs; cooked dressing; lettuce leaves

Why it works: Egg and lettuce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,301 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Egg Salad

Ingredients

hard boiled eggs
cooked dressing
lettuce leaves

Directions

Prepare

Cut hard boiled eggs in half crosswise.
Remove the yolks and moisten them with cooked dressing.
Refill the egg whites with the yolk mixture.

Serve

Serve on lettuce leaves with additional cooked 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.

Egg + lettucetop 30% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,301 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard boiled eggs: Provide the whites that hold the filling and the yolks that form the creamy base.
Cooked dressing: Moistens the yolks, giving the filling a smooth, creamy texture and rich flavor.
Lettuce leaves: Serve as a crisp, fresh bed that holds the stuffed eggs.

“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.