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Potato Salad

A cold potato salad with sour cream dressing, vinegar, sugar, mustard, eggs, celery seed, onions, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,169 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Potato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. Mix sour cream, vinegar, sugar, and mustard in a bowl until combined. Beat in the eggs until smooth.

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Boil the potatoes with skins on.

  2. Peel and slice the boiled potatoes thin.

  3. Season the sliced potatoes with salt, pepper, celery seed, and sliced onions.

Assemble

  1. Pour the dressing over the cold potatoes. Stir thoroughly with a silver fork.

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. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  3. Potato + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,047 recipes

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

  4. Mustard + potatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,340 recipes

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

  5. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Beaten eggs thicken the dressing and give it a smooth, creamy body.
Sour cream
Provides the creamy base and rich moisture of the dressing.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances its richness.
Sugar
Sweetens the dressing to offset the vinegar's sharpness.
Potatoes
Form the bulk of the salad and absorb the dressing's flavour.

The step that matters

Beat in the eggs until smooth. Eggs thicken when gently heated, so adding them to a cold, acidic dressing without thorough beating can leave lumps or a loose texture. Beating them smooth distributes the proteins evenly for a uniform, creamy dressing.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, vinegar, sugar, mustard, egg, pepper, celery):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, vinegar, sugar, mustard, egg, pepper, celery. 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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