Name: Egg-and-Beetroot Salad
Ingredients: cooked beetroot; olive oil; eggs; pepper; lemon juice

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Egg-and-Beetroot Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Peel and slice the cooked beetroot.
Heat the beetroot in a pan with a few tablespoons of olive oil over medium heat until hot.
In another pan, poach the eggs and trim them.
Arrange the slices of beetroot in the center of a hot dish and garnish with the poached eggs.
Lightly sprinkle with pepper and squeeze lemon juice over the top before serving.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Olive + lemontop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,922 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Beetroot + olivetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together965 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).
Olive + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together30,263 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Beetroot + lemontop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together574 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).