Name: Ground Artichoke Salad
Ingredients: artichoke; onion; celery seed; mustard seed; celery; French dressing; lettuce leaves

Why it works: Mustard and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,356 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Ground Artichoke Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the artichoke until tender, then peel and slice it.
Finely chop the onion and celery.
In a bowl, mix the sliced artichoke, chopped onion, celery seed, mustard seed, and chopped celery.
Serve the mixture on lettuce leaves with French dressing.

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.

Mustard + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,356 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Artichoke + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together101 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Celery + mustardtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,169 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Artichoke + mustardtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together116 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (artichoke, celery, mustard, lettuce):

Beetrootfits better
Turnipfits better
Horseradishfits better
Onionthe original

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