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Salad

Potato Salad

A salad of boiled potatoes with oil, vinegar, and herbs, optionally topped with pickled beetroot, cucumber, herring, or sardines.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Chive and beetroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 172 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Potato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Boil the potatoes in their skins until tender.

  2. While warm, peel and slice the potatoes thinly.

Dress and serve

  1. In a salad bowl, add chopped chives, onions, and parsley over the potatoes.

  2. Sprinkle with salt and pepper.

  3. Add oil, then moisten with a mixture of vinegar and water to taste.

  4. Optionally, add sliced pickled beetroot, fresh cucumber, minced herring, or shredded sardines for extra flavor.

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. Chive + beetroottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together172 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Chive + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together244 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Beetroot + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together345 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Potato + chivetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together611 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Potatoes
Form the bulk of the salad and absorb the dressing as they cool.
Oil
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor through the potatoes.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the oil.
Chives
Add a mild onion aroma and fresh flavor.
Onions
Add sharp, pungent flavor that mellows slightly when mixed.

The step that matters

Slice the potatoes while warm and dress them promptly. Warm potatoes absorb oil and vinegar more readily than cold ones, so the dressing penetrates evenly instead of sitting on the surface.

Swap the beetroot

The recipe marks beetroot as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, vinegar, pepper, chive, onion, parsley, cucumber):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Lettucefits about as well
  3. Broccolifits about as well
  4. Beetrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, vinegar, pepper, chive, onion, parsley, cucumber. 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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