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Deviled Egg Salad

A salad of deviled eggs served on lettuce and watercress.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 307 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Deviled Egg Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Boil and peel

  1. Boil the eggs hard, turning them constantly to prevent the yolk from sticking to the shell.

  2. Plunge the eggs into cold water immediately after boiling to prevent discoloration and aid in shell removal.

  3. Peel the eggs carefully and cut them in half lengthwise.

Make the filling

  1. Remove the yolks and place them in a bowl. Mash the yolks with a fork until they crumble to powder.

  2. Add olive oil, vinegar or lemon juice, salt, mustard, and Tabasco or paprika to the yolks and mix well.

Serve

  1. Spoon the yolk mixture back into the egg whites and serve on nests of lettuce and watercress.

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. Lettuce + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together307 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mustard + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,356 recipes

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

  3. Mustard + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together293 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard-boiled eggs
Provide the yolks that mash into the creamy base and the whites that hold the filling.
Olive oil
Adds fat that makes the yolk mixture smooth and rich in texture.
Vinegar or lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the rich yolks.
Mustard
Adds sharp flavour and helps emulsify the oil into the yolks.

The step that matters

Mash the yolks until they crumble to powder. Fine, evenly broken yolks blend with the oil and acid into a smooth filling; lumps left behind make the mixture grainy and uneven.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, olive, vinegar, mustard, sauce, watercress):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Shallotfits about as well
  3. Lettucethe original
  4. Chivefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, olive, vinegar, mustard, sauce, watercress. 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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