Name: Potato and Tomato Salad
Ingredients: 6 cold potatoes; 6 large tomatoes; 6 teaspoons salad oil; 2 teaspoons French vinegar; 1 teaspoon tarragon vinegar; 1 teaspoon chopped shallot; ¼ teaspoon castor sugar; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; Watercress

Why it works: Shallot and watercress share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 93 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Potato and Tomato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Trim the cooked potatoes to the same size and slice them into ¼‑inch thick slices.
Skin the tomatoes and slice them to the same thickness as the potatoes.
Chop the shallot finely.

Make the dressing

Combine the shallot with salad oil, French vinegar, tarragon vinegar, castor sugar, coarse sea salt, and pepper in a bowl, then mix thoroughly.

Assemble

In a salad bowl, arrange the potato slices alternately with the tomato slices.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Shallot + watercresstop 1% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together93 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Tarragon + shallottop 1% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together602 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Tarragon + watercresstop 1% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together108 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Potato + watercresstop 4% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together170 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Potato + tomatotop 5% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together2,798 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes: Provide the starchy bulk of the salad, holding their shape when sliced and cooked.
Tomatoes: Add juicy moisture and acidity that brightens the salad.
Salad oil: Carries the flavours of the dressing and coats the slices with fat.
French vinegar: Adds sharp acidity that balances the oil and sugar in the dressing.
Castor sugar: Adds a little sweetness that rounds out the acidity of the vinegars.

Flavor stand-ins for the shallot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, tomato, vinegar, tarragon, sugar, watercress):

Mustardabout as good a flavor fit
Lettuceabout as good a flavor fit
Beetrootabout as good a flavor fit
Shallotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, tomato, vinegar, tarragon, sugar, watercress. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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.