Name: One Meal Endive Salad
Ingredients: 2 crisp bunches of endive; 1 medium sized Bermuda onion; 2 cups cold boiled diced potatoes; 1 cup diced bacon (partly lean); ½ cup vinegar; 2 hard cooked eggs, diced; ½ cup sweet or sour cream; 1 teaspoon salt (or more to taste); ½ teaspoon white pepper

Why it works: Onion and potato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,023 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

One Meal Endive Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Wash the endive and chop it medium fine with the onion.
Boil the potatoes with jackets on in salted water until tender, then peel and dice them.
When the potatoes are cold, combine the endive, onion, and potatoes.

Make the dressing

Place the diced bacon in a skillet and fry until golden brown.
When the bacon is done and still hot, add the vinegar and pour it over the endive, onion, and potato mixture.
Next, add the hard cooked eggs, sour cream, salt, and pepper.
For a sweet salad, add ⅓ cup of sugar to the cream before mixing.

Serve

Serve the salad warm or cold.

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.

Onion + potatotop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,023 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Endive + potatotop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Endive + oniontop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together214 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Onion + vinegartop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together18,226 recipes

Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).
Endive + vinegartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together221 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Endive: Provides the crisp, slightly bitter leafy base of the salad.
Bacon: Adds fat and savory flavor, and its hot drippings help flavor the salad.
Potatoes: Give the salad body and bulk while staying soft and tender when cold.
Vinegar: Adds acidity that sharpens the flavor and balances the fat and cream.
Sour cream: Adds richness and a creamy, tangy moisture to the salad.
Hard cooked eggs: Add richness and a soft texture that binds the salad together.

The step that matters

Adding the vinegar to hot bacon. The vinegar must go in while the bacon and its drippings are still hot, so the acid and fat coat the endive, onion, and potatoes evenly and the salad absorbs the flavor before it cools.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (endive, onion, potato, vinegar, egg, cream):

Tarragonfits better
Garlicfits better
Capersfits better
White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against endive, onion, potato, vinegar, egg, cream. 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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One Meal Endive Salad