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Potato Salad

A potato salad with walnuts, olives, capers, and a mustard‑flour dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 18 ingredients
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Why it works: Olive and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,688 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Potato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the potatoes

  1. Boil the sliced potatoes until tender, then dice them.

Make the dressing

  1. In a separate pot, scald the milk and add the vinegar.

  2. Mix the flour, mustard, brown sugar, salt, cayenne, and black pepper in a bowl.

  3. Add the beaten eggs to the dry ingredients, then stir in the scalded milk and vinegar.

  4. Cook the mixture over low heat until it thickens to the consistency of molasses.

Combine and serve

  1. Combine the diced potatoes, broken walnuts, olives, capers or nasturtium seeds, and celery in a bowl.

  2. Pour half of the dressing over the potato mixture and toss to combine.

  3. Garnish the dish with sliced hard-boiled eggs, celery, and capers.

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. Olive + caperstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,688 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Walnut + olivetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,087 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Capers + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,024 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Potato + olivetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,458 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  5. Walnut + caperstop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together156 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
Provide the bulk of the salad and a soft, starchy body once boiled and diced.
Eggs
Beaten into the dressing, they thicken it as they set with the heat.
Flour
Thickens the dressing together with the eggs, giving it a smooth, body-rich texture.
Milk
Forms the creamy base of the dressing, adding richness and mellowing the vinegar.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the dressing and balances the sweetness and richness.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that rounds out the sharpness of the vinegar and mustard.

The step that matters

Cooking the dressing over low heat. Beaten eggs and starch thicken as proteins set with heat. Cooking gently over low heat keeps the eggs from scrambling and curdling while the dressing thickens smoothly.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, meat, olive, capers, milk, vinegar, flour):

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Beansfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, meat, olive, capers, milk, vinegar, flour. 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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