Name: Grape Fruit and Cherry Salad
Ingredients: 1 grapefruit; maraschino cherries; French dressing; lettuce leaves

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 and Cherry Salad

Ingredients

1 grapefruit
maraschino cherries
French dressing
lettuce leaves

Directions

Prepare

Cut the grapefruit in half and remove the sections, discarding the white skins.
Let the sections sit in French dressing for a few minutes.

Assemble and serve

Place white lettuce leaves on salad plates.
Arrange the grapefruit sections and maraschino cherries on the lettuce.

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 tart, bright citrus flavor and juicy texture to the salad.
Maraschino cherries: Add sweetness and a bright red color that contrasts with the grapefruit.
French dressing: Seasons the grapefruit sections and adds sweet-tart flavor and moisture.
Lettuce leaves: Provide a crisp, cool base that holds the fruit.

“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.