Name: Mayonnaise Salad
Ingredients: hard-boiled eggs, quartered; parsley, chopped; French green capers, dried; filleted anchovies (optional); stoned olives (optional); pickled gherkins (optional); dried bread crumbs; cochineal (optional)

Why it works: Parsley and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,550 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Mayonnaise Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mayonnaise sauce and form it into a dome shape.
Arrange quartered hard-boiled eggs around the base of the salad.
Sprinkle chopped parsley over the salad.
Stick dried French green capers into the mayonnaise at intervals.
If desired, add filleted anchovies and stoned olives around the base.
For meat salads, add thinly sliced pickled gherkins around the edge.
To color bread crumbs, mix with cochineal and sprinkle over the mayonnaise.
Garnish with a small piece of parsley or whole prawns if using.
Chill the salad in the ice chest until ready to serve.

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.

Parsley + caperstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,550 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Capers + olivetop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,688 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Parsley + olivetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,649 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Olive + breadtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,091 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).
Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together22,662 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).