Name: English Salad
Ingredients: 4 cooked beets; 4 radishes; 5 raw tomatoes; watercress; 1 head of lettuce; 1 cucumber; 1 hard-boiled egg; French dressing

Why it works: Watercress and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 307 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

English Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Pull the head of lettuce into pieces.
Peel and slice the beets, tomatoes, cucumbers, and radishes thinly.
Mix the sliced vegetables with the chopped watercress.

Serve

Garnish the salad with sliced tomato and hard-boiled egg.
Serve the French dressing in a separate bowl, not on the salad.

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.

Watercress + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together307 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Lettuce + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,409 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Radish + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together212 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Radish + watercresstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Radish + lettucetop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together58 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

Lettuce: Forms the crisp leafy base that holds the other vegetables.
Beets: Add earthy sweetness and a firm texture when sliced thinly.
Tomatoes: Add juiciness and a mild acidity to the salad.
Hard-boiled egg: Adds richness and a soft, creamy texture as a garnish.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (radish, watercress, lettuce, cucumber, egg):

Beetrootfits better
Horseradishfits better
Chivefits better
Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against radish, watercress, lettuce, cucumber, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.