Name: Endive Salad, German Style
Ingredients: Endives; coarse sea salt; black pepper; vinegar; olive oil; parsley or chives, finely chopped; boiled new potatoes, sliced; pickled beets; hard boiled eggs

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Endive Salad, German Style

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the endives as in the previous recipe.
Season with coarse sea salt, black pepper, vinegar, and olive oil.
Add finely chopped parsley or chives and half as much sliced boiled new potatoes as there is salad.
Mix gently and garnish with pickled beets and hard boiled eggs cut in halves.

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 + parsleytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Parsley + potatotop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,855 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Endive + parsleytop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together107 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Olive + parsleytop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,649 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Olive + potatotop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,458 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (endive, pepper, vinegar, olive, parsley, egg):

Lettucefits better
Shallotfits better
Chivefits better
Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against endive, pepper, vinegar, olive, parsley, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.