Name: Orange Salad
Ingredients: 4 oranges; ⅓ cup lemon juice; ¾ cup salad oil; ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange Salad

Ingredients

4 oranges
⅓ cup lemon juice
¾ cup salad oil
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper

Directions

Prepare

Thinly slice the oranges and remove the seeds.
In a bowl, mix the lemon juice, salad oil, and cayenne pepper.

Dress and serve

Dress the sliced oranges with the mixture.
Serve with cold game or roast pork.

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.

Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,634 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Orange + peppertop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,402 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

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

What each ingredient does

Oranges: Provide the main body, fresh juice and bright citrus flavour of the salad.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the richness of the oil.
Salad oil: Carries fat and flavour through the dressing and coats the orange slices.
Cayenne pepper: Adds a light background heat that sharpens the citrus and oil.