Name: Pear Salad
Ingredients: Pears; Lettuce; French dressing

Why it works: Pear and lettuce share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Pear Salad

Ingredients

Pears
Lettuce
French dressing

Directions

Prepare

Remove the blossom end and core the pears, one for each person.
Slice the pears crosswise, keeping them together with the stem on top.

Serve

Place each pear on a bed of lettuce.
Serve 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.

Pear + lettucetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together92 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Pears: Provide the sweet, juicy fruit that forms the main body of the salad.
Lettuce: Forms a crisp, cool bed that holds each pear and adds fresh texture.
French dressing: Adds acidity and sweetness that moistens the fruit and lettuce and balances flavour.

“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.