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Vegetable Salad

A salad of diced tomatoes and celery mixed with mayonnaise, salt, and pepper, served on lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and lettuce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,655 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Vegetable Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Dice the tomatoes and cut the celery finely.

Combine and serve

  1. Mix the tomatoes, celery, mayonnaise, salt, and black pepper together.

  2. Serve the mixture on a bed of lettuce.

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.

  1. Tomato + lettucetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Pepper + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Supply the bulk and juicy moisture of the salad.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and creaminess that coats and binds the vegetables together.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Eggplantfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, pepper. 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.

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