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Potato Salad

A chilled potato salad with onions, hard‑boiled eggs, mustard, butter, dressing, vinegar, celery, and garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,023 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Potato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil and cool the potatoes, then chop them into small pieces.

  2. Finely chop the onion and add it to the potatoes.

  3. Chop the whites of the hard-boiled eggs and mash the yolks.

Make the dressing and combine

  1. Mix the yolks with mustard, sugar, melted butter, salt, and pepper.

  2. Combine this mixture with the potatoes and onion.

  3. Stir in the salad dressing and vinegar.

  4. Chop celery stalks and mix them in with the potato mixture.

Garnish and serve

  1. Slice additional boiled eggs and place them on top.

  2. Garnish the dish with celery tops.

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 + oniontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,023 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Potato + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,340 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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 give it its main body and texture.
Hard-boiled eggs
Enrich the dressing with yolk fat and add creaminess and body.
Salad dressing
Provides moisture, tang and seasoning that bind the salad together.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the richness.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the yolk mixture.
Celery
Adds crisp texture and a fresh, slightly vegetal crunch.

The step that matters

Mash the yolks smoothly with the seasonings before combining. Mashing the yolks with mustard, sugar, butter and salt first lets the fat and seasonings disperse evenly, so the dressing coats the potatoes rather than leaving lumps of yolk or uneven flavour.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, egg, mustard, sugar, butter, pepper, vinegar):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, egg, mustard, sugar, butter, pepper, 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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