Name: Stuffed Onion Salad
Ingredients: cooked onions; hard-boiled eggs; thick salad dressing

Why it works: Onion and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 34% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 23,333 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Stuffed Onion Salad

Ingredients

cooked onions
hard-boiled eggs
thick salad dressing

Directions

Prepare

Select medium-sized cooked onions, aiming for uniformity in size.
For each onion, use half a hard-boiled egg.

Make the filling

Dice the hard-boiled eggs.
Moisten the diced eggs with thick salad dressing.

Assemble

Stuff the mixture into the cooked onions.

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.

Onion + eggtop 34% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together23,333 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Onion and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 23,333 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked onions: Hollow shells that hold the filling and give a soft, sweet base.
Hard-boiled eggs: Provide the main filling, with a firm, creamy texture once diced.
Thick salad dressing: Adds moisture and richness, binding the diced eggs into a spreadable filling.

“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.