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Egg Salad

Egg Salad is a dish of boiled eggs mixed with minced chicken, ham, or salmon, parsley, and dressing, served on lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,483 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Egg Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the eggs, then remove the shells.

  2. Carefully separate the yolks without breaking them.

  3. Cut the egg whites into thin strips or chop them finely.

Mix and serve

  1. Mix the chopped egg whites with an equal quantity of minced chicken, ham, or salmon.

  2. Add the parsley to the mixture.

  3. Arrange the mixture on a bed of lettuce and garnish with the yolks.

  4. Serve with your choice of dressing.

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 + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

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

  2. Chicken + lettucetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,421 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Chicken + parsleytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,314 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Egg + parsleytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,765 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Egg + chickentop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,991 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Whites give the salad its bulk and texture, while the yolks add richness and a golden garnish.
Minced chicken, ham, or salmon
Provides the substantial, savoury protein that makes up most of the salad.
Parsley
Adds a fresh, herbal aroma and a bright green flavour that lightens the richness.

The step that matters

Carefully separate the yolks without breaking them. Yolks are rich in fat and are used whole as the garnish. A broken yolk leaks into the whites and muddies the appearance, so keep them intact.

Flavor stand-ins for the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, chicken, parsley):

  1. Potatobetter flavor fit
  2. Leekbetter flavor fit
  3. Chivebetter flavor fit
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, chicken, parsley. 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).

“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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