Name: Beet Salad
Ingredients: cold cooked beets; lettuce leaves; cress or chicory; French dressing

Why it works: Lettuce and chicory share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 40 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Beet Salad

Ingredients

cold cooked beets
lettuce leaves
cress or chicory
French dressing

Directions

Prepare

Cut cold cooked beets into thin slices.
When ready to serve, cut the beets into dice.

Assemble and serve

Mix the diced beets with lettuce leaves and cress or chicory.
Pour French dressing over the salad.

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 + chicorytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together40 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold cooked beets: Provide the main body, sweetness and colour of the salad.
Lettuce leaves: Add crisp texture and bulk to the salad.
Cress or chicory: Add a crisp, slightly bitter note that balances the sweet beets.
French dressing: Adds moisture, acidity and fat that coat the leaves and beets.

“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.