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Salad

Alligator Pear Salad

A salad of cubed alligator pears tossed with olive oil, salt, and optional onion, served on lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Olive and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,580 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Alligator Pear Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Peel and remove the stone from the alligator pears.

  2. Cut the pears into ½-inch cubes.

  3. Sprinkle the cubes with coarse sea salt.

Dress and serve

  1. Add olive oil and minced onion if desired.

  2. Place the mixture in a salad dish lined with crisp lettuce leaves.

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

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

  2. Onion + lettucetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,562 recipes

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

  3. Olive + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,779 recipes

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

  4. Pear + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together92 recipes

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

  5. Pear + olivetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together328 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Alligator pears
Provides the creamy, rich flesh that forms the body of the salad.
Olive oil
Adds fat and a silky texture that coats the pear cubes.
Onion
Adds a sharp, aromatic bite that balances the mild, rich pear.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pear, olive, lettuce):

  1. Beetrootfits better
  2. Cucumberfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, olive, lettuce. 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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