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Salad

Potato and Egg Salad

A salad of boiled potatoes and eggs dressed with French dressing and served on watercress.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and watercress work together. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 170 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Potato and Egg Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the eggs and potatoes

  1. Hard boil the eggs for 30 minutes.

  2. Shell and finely chop them with a silver knife.

  3. Boil the potatoes until tender.

  4. Dice them while hot.

Combine and cool

  1. Mix the diced potatoes with the chopped eggs and add French dressing.

  2. Let the mixture cool.

Serve

  1. Serve on a bed of watercress with additional French dressing or boiled dressing thinned with vinegar.

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. Potato + watercresstop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together170 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Watercress + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together465 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Potato + vinegartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,608 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Egg + watercresstop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together638 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  5. Egg + potatotop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,978 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Add richness and a soft, creamy body to the salad.
Potatoes
Provide bulk and a tender, starchy base that holds the dressing.
French dressing
Adds moisture, fat and seasoning that coat the eggs and potatoes.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the boiled dressing.

The step that matters

Dice the potatoes while hot. Warm potatoes are more porous and absorb dressing readily, so they take on flavour evenly. Once cold, they absorb less and the dressing sits on the surface.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, watercress, vinegar):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, watercress, vinegar. 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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