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Salad

Potato Salad

A salad of boiled potatoes with parsley, chives, onion, hot stock, oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, garnished with pickled beetroot or cucumber.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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

Oven, in the book's wordsA good oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Boil the potatoes in their skins, then peel and slice them thinly.

Assemble and dress

  1. Layer the potato slices in a salad bowl, sprinkling each layer with parsley, onion, chives, salt, and pepper.

  2. Mix the oil and vinegar together, add the hot stock, and pour it over the salad.

  3. Mix lightly, garnish with beetroot and cucumber, and serve before the potatoes are quite cold.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Parsley + chivetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Chive + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,907 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, giving body to the dish.
Hot stock
Soaks into the warm potato slices, adding moisture and savoury flavour.
Salad oil
Carries flavour and coats the potato slices, giving a smooth mouthfeel.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the fat of the oil.

The step that matters

Dressing the salad while the potatoes are still warm. Warm potato starch is porous and readily absorbs the liquid dressing, so pouring it over warm slices gives even flavour. Once cold, the potatoes absorb far less and the dressing tends to pool.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, parsley, chive, vinegar, pepper, beetroot):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, parsley, chive, vinegar, pepper, beetroot. 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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German 31Hot 19Dressing 17Anchovy 15French 10American 9 See all 504 →

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