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Egg Salad

A salad of sliced hard‑boiled eggs mixed with Parmesan, olives, pepper, salt, milk, and butter, served on lettuce and garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Egg Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut hard boiled eggs into strips.

  2. Rub the yolks through a sieve and mix with the Parmesan cheese.

Make the salad

  1. Add chopped olives, pepper, salt, milk, and melted butter to moisten.

  2. Whip the egg whites and combine with the yolk mixture.

  3. Serve on a bed of lettuce and garnish with parsley.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,483 recipes

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

  3. Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

  4. Olive + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,649 recipes

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

  5. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Hard boiled eggs
Provide the main body of the salad, with whites and yolks giving different textures.
Parmesan cheese
Mixed with the yolks to add savory flavor and a firmer, richer texture.
Melted butter
Adds fat and richness, helping moisten the salad.
Milk
Adds moisture so the yolk mixture becomes softer and easier to spread.
Chopped olives
Add salty, briny flavor that contrasts with the rich eggs.

The step that matters

Whip the egg whites and combine with the yolk mixture. Whipped whites hold air, so folding them gently into the yolk mixture keeps the salad light. Overmixing deflates the foam and makes the texture dense.

Flavor stand-ins for the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, parmesan cheese, olive, pepper, milk, butter, parsley):

  1. Potatobetter flavor fit
  2. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  3. Tomatobetter flavor fit
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, parmesan cheese, olive, pepper, milk, butter, 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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