Name: Green Pepper and Tomato Salad
Ingredients: large green bell peppers; smooth red tomatoes; thick mayonnaise dressing

Why it works: Pepper and tomato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,923 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Green Pepper and Tomato Salad

Ingredients

large green bell peppers
smooth red tomatoes
thick mayonnaise dressing

Directions

Halve the bell peppers and remove the seeds.
Peel the tomatoes and place one in each half of the pepper.
Serve each pepper half on a salad plate with a ball of mayonnaise dressing beside it.

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.

Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,923 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

Bell peppers: Hollow halves act as edible cups that hold the tomato and give the salad its structure.
Tomatoes: Provide juicy, acidic filling and fresh flavour inside each pepper half.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds richness and fat, balancing the tomato's acidity and the pepper's sharpness.

“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.