Name: Lettuce Salad
Ingredients: 3 hard-boiled egg yolks; coarse sea salt to taste; mustard to taste; 2 teaspoons olive oil or melted butter

Why it works: Mustard and olive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,950 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Lettuce Salad

Ingredients

3 hard-boiled egg yolks
coarse sea salt to taste
mustard to taste
2 teaspoons olive oil or melted butter

Directions

Mash the yolks of the hard-boiled eggs finely.
Add coarse sea salt and mustard to taste.
Make a paste by mixing in the olive oil or melted butter.
Mix thoroughly and dilute as needed.

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.

Mustard + olivetop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together5,950 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Egg + mustardtop 28% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,210 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
Egg + olivetop 31% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together15,340 recipes

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