Name: Lettuce and Sweet Pepper
Ingredients: Lettuce; Red sweet peppers; French dressing

Why it works: Lettuce and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,037 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Lettuce and Sweet Pepper

Ingredients

Lettuce
Red sweet peppers
French dressing

Directions

Prepare

Cut the lettuce into pieces using kitchen shears.
Remove the seeds and top from the red sweet peppers. Cut the peppers in a similar manner.

Serve

Serve the sliced peppers on top of the lettuce and drizzle with French 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.

Lettuce + peppertop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,037 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 crisp, leafy base of the salad.
Red sweet peppers: Add crunch and mild sweetness to the salad.
French dressing: Adds moisture, acidity and savory flavor to the leaves and peppers.

“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.