Name: Lettuce and Cucumber Salad
Ingredients: 1 head of lettuce; 2 cucumbers; mayonnaise

Why it works: Lettuce and cucumber match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,409 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Lettuce and Cucumber Salad

Ingredients

1 head of lettuce
2 cucumbers
mayonnaise

Directions

Slice the cucumbers and place them on a bed of lettuce.
Pour mayonnaise over the salad before serving.

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.

Lettuce + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,409 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Lettuce: Forms the bed and base of the salad, adding crisp texture and fresh bulk.
Cucumbers: Add crisp, cool, watery texture and a fresh, mild flavour.
Mayonnaise: Adds fat and creamy richness that coats the vegetables and carries flavour.

“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.