Name: Frozen Vegetable Salad
Ingredients: 9 large tomatoes; 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce; 1 stalk celery, finely chopped; 2 medium cucumbers; ⅛ teaspoon grated horseradish; 1 tablespoon grated onion; 1 cup cooked dressing; 1 cup whipped cream; coarse sea salt to taste

Why it works: Cucumber and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 640 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Frozen Vegetable Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Peel and cut the tomatoes into small pieces, then drain in a colander.
Peel the cucumbers, cut them in half lengthwise, and slice into quarters.
Mix the cucumbers with the tomatoes, celery, and green pepper.
Add Worcestershire sauce, horseradish, onion, and sprinkle with salt.
Fold in the cooked dressing gently.
Prepare a melon mold and layer the salad mixture with whipped cream until full.
Pack the mold in ice and salt for 3 to 3.5 hours.
To serve, turn the salad out onto a platter lined with lettuce leaves and garnish with pepper rings.

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.

Cucumber + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together640 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Tomato + cucumbertop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,405 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,377 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Celery + horseradishtop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together835 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Horseradish + oniontop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,784 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sauce, celery, cucumber, horseradish, onion, cream):

Mustardfits better
Beetrootfits better
Chivefits better
Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sauce, celery, cucumber, horseradish, onion, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.