Name: Fish Salad
Ingredients: cold cooked halibut; tarragon vinegar or spiced vinegar; lettuce leaves; Mayonnaise or sauce tartare

Why it works: Tarragon and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 425 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Fish Salad

Ingredients

cold cooked halibut
tarragon vinegar or spiced vinegar
lettuce leaves
Mayonnaise or sauce tartare

Directions

Break the cold cooked halibut into convenient pieces, removing all skin, bones, and fat.
Marinate the halibut with tarragon vinegar or spiced vinegar and set aside for 1 hour.
Arrange the marinated halibut on leaves of lettuce.
Serve with Mayonnaise or sauce tartare.

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.

Tarragon + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together425 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Tarragon + saucetop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together566 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Lettuce + saucetop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,019 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).