Name: Pear Salad
Ingredients: large pears; lettuce leaves; chopped nuts; sweet salad 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

large pears
lettuce leaves
chopped nuts
sweet salad dressing

Directions

Stew large pears cut in halves with the cores removed.
Place the pears on a lettuce leaf, core side up.
Fill the pears with chopped nuts.
Cover with sweet salad 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).
Lettuce + nutstop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together174 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).
Pear + nutstop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together26 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl decanoate (grape, waxy).