Name: Pineapple Salad
Ingredients: 1 cup strawberries, hulled; 2 cups lettuce, torn into pieces; 1 cup pineapple, cut into small pieces; Salad dressing of your choice

Why it works: Lettuce and pineapple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 271 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Pineapple Salad

Ingredients

1 cup strawberries, hulled
2 cups lettuce, torn into pieces
1 cup pineapple, cut into small pieces
Salad dressing of your choice

Directions

Prepare

Wash the strawberries and remove the hulls.
Wash the lettuce leaves and tear them into pieces.

Assemble and serve

In a serving dish, layer the pineapple pieces over the strawberries.
Top with the torn lettuce.
Drizzle with salad dressing before serving.

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 + pineappletop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together271 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Strawberries: Provide sweetness, juiciness and a bright flavour to the salad.
Lettuce: Adds crisp texture and fresh body as the top layer.
Pineapple: Adds sweet-tart flavour and juicy texture to the layers.

“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.