Name: Delicate Salad
Ingredients: Celery; Canned or fresh pineapple; Filbert nuts; Fresh pears; Mayonnaise dressing; Lettuce leaves; Cooked beets

Why it works: Pineapple and pear match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 169 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Delicate Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Cut celery into small pieces using scissors.
Cut pineapple into neat pieces.
Pour boiling water over filbert nuts and remove the skin, leaving them whole.
Halve the fresh pears and scoop out the center to form cases.
Mix mayonnaise dressing with the celery, pineapple, and nuts.
Fill the pear halves with the mixture.
Place the filled pears on lettuce leaves and garnish with cooked beets cut into heart shapes.

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.

Pineapple + peartop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together169 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Filbert + nutstop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together38 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).
Pear + lettucetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together92 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Pineapple + lettucetop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together271 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

Swap the filbert

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (celery, pineapple, nuts, pear, lettuce):

Walnutfits better
Chestnutfits better
Pistachiofits better
Filbertthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, pineapple, nuts, pear, lettuce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.