Name: Egg Salad
Ingredients: 6 boiled eggs; 2 tablespoons minced onion; minced parsley; cooked salad dressing; 6 olives; crisp lettuce leaves

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 the eggs

Boil the eggs and let them cool.
Cut the eggs in half lengthwise and remove the yolks.

Assemble and serve

Mix the yolks with the minced onion, parsley, salad dressing, and chopped olives.
Place the mixture on crisp lettuce leaves and pour additional dressing over the top.

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.

Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,483 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,580 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Parsley + olivetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,649 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Onion + lettucetop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,562 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Onion + olivetop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together29,779 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs: Provide the main body of the salad, with yolks blended into a creamy filling.
Cooked salad dressing: Adds moisture and richness, binding the yolk mixture into a spreadable filling.
Minced onion: Adds sharp, aromatic flavor that cuts through the richness of the yolks.
Olives: Add salty, briny flavor and a slight chewy texture to the filling.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

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

Chivebetter flavor fit
Spinachbetter flavor fit
Beetrootbetter flavor fit
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, parsley, olive, lettuce. 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.