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Salad

Savoury Potato Salad

A potato salad made with boiled potatoes, garlic, radishes, onion, mustard, parsley, pickled gherkin, and olive oil vinaigrette.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Savoury Potato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the potatoes until tender.

  2. Cut the boiled potatoes into dice.

  3. Rub a salad bowl with garlic.

Assemble

  1. Layer the potatoes in the bowl, sprinkling grated radishes and chopped onion between the layers.

  2. Add mustard and cress.

  3. Mix in parsley and pickled gherkin.

  4. Season with salt and pepper.

Dress and serve

  1. Drizzle with olive oil and vinegar or lemon juice to taste.

  2. Toss gently to combine without breaking the potatoes.

  3. Serve.

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. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Radish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together297 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

  5. Potato + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,517 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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 a tender, starchy body.
Olive oil
Adds fat and richness, coating the potatoes and carrying flavour.
Vinegar or lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the fat.
Mustard
Adds a sharp, pungent note that cuts through the richness of the oil.
Garlic
Adds a pungent aroma that perfumes the bowl and the salad.

The step that matters

Toss gently to combine without breaking the potatoes. Cut potatoes hold their shape when their cell walls stay intact. Rough handling ruptures them and releases starch, which turns the salad pasty and mashed rather than tender and distinct.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, garlic, radish, onion, mustard, parsley, pepper):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Dillfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, garlic, radish, onion, mustard, parsley, 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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