Name: Grape Fruit Salad
Ingredients: 1 grapefruit; Lettuce leaves; Mayonnaise dressing

Why it works: Grapefruit and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Grape Fruit Salad

Ingredients

1 grapefruit
Lettuce leaves
Mayonnaise dressing

Directions

Prepare

Separate the grapefruit into sections.
Using scissors, snip the membrane encasing the sections and carefully peel it from the pulp.

Assemble

Arrange 3 or 4 sections in a circle on lettuce leaves.
In the center, place 1 teaspoon or more of mayonnaise dressing.

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.

Grapefruit + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together118 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Grapefruit: Provides the main fruit flavor and the juicy, tangy sections that make up the salad.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds richness and creaminess that balances the tartness of the grapefruit.

“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.