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Salad

Potato Salad

A salad of sliced boiled potatoes tossed with capers, parsley, tarragon, thyme, oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Potato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Cut the boiled potatoes into slices the thickness of a penny.

  2. Rub a serving dish with garlic.

  3. Arrange the potato slices neatly on the dish.

Make the dressing

  1. In a bowl, combine the minced capers, parsley, tarragon, and thyme.

  2. Add the oil and vinegar in a 2:1 ratio, then season with salt and pepper. Mix well and pour over the potatoes.

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 + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Capers + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together379 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Tarragon + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together528 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + tarragontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Capers + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,550 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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's flavor.
Capers
Add a sharp, salty bite that brightens the dish.
Oil
Carries fat-soluble flavor and gives the dressing a rich, smooth mouthfeel.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the oil and lifts the herbs.

The step that matters

Mix well and pour over the potatoes. Oil and vinegar separate on their own, so they must be mixed thoroughly into an emulsion before pouring. Dressing poured over unmixed will pool and leave the potatoes unevenly seasoned.

Swap the potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (capers, parsley, tarragon, thyme, vinegar, pepper):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against capers, parsley, tarragon, thyme, vinegar, pepper. 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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