Why it works: Chestnut and lettuce share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 64 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓
Chestnut Salad
Ingredients
Directions
Boil large Spanish chestnuts for about 10 minutes.
Remove the shells and boil again in salted water until tender.
Transfer to ice cold water until thoroughly chilled.
Drain well and serve on lettuce leaves with mayonnaise dressing.
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.
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Chestnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together64 recipes
Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
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