Name: Egg Salad
Ingredients: 6 cloves of garlic; a few capers; 2 anchovies

Why it works: Garlic and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 834 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Egg Salad

Ingredients

6 cloves of garlic
a few capers
2 anchovies

Directions

Boil the garlic for 5 minutes.
Pound the boiled garlic with the capers and anchovies until well mixed.

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.

Garlic + caperstop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together834 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Clove + caperstop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together412 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,368 recipes

Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (garlic, capers):

Parsleybetter flavor fit
Oreganobetter flavor fit
Tarragonbetter flavor fit
Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against garlic, capers. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).