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Salad

Potato Salad

A chilled salad of sliced potatoes, parsley, celery seed, dill pickle, oil, vinegar, and lemon, served with sliced lemon and grated raw beets.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Potato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the potatoes thinly and mix thoroughly.

  2. Add parsley, celery seed, and salt to taste.

  3. Add one dill pickle for every five potatoes and mix again.

Dress and serve

  1. Heat the oil and vinegar in separate vessels.

  2. Pour the hot vinegar over the salad, then add the oil.

  3. Flavor with lemon juice or serve with sliced lemon and grated raw beets.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + dilltop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together669 recipes

    Shared aroma: p-mentha-1,3,8-triene (camphor, herbal).

  3. Dill + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together976 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

  5. Celery + dilltop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together382 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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 as the body of the dish.
Boiled grape vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that brightens the salad and balances the oil.
Oil
Adds fat and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the dressing.
Dill pickle
Contributes salty, tangy flavor and a crisp bite.

The step that matters

Pour the hot vinegar over the salad, then add the oil. Potatoes absorb liquid most readily while still warm, so pouring the hot vinegar over them first lets the potato starch take up the acidity. Adding the oil afterward coats the slices, since oil and vinegar do not mix and oil added first would block the vinegar from soaking in.

Swap the grape

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, parsley, celery, dill, vinegar, lemon):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Grapethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, parsley, celery, dill, vinegar, lemon. 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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