Name: Sardine Salad
Ingredients: 1 box best sardines; 12 small sour pickles; 4 square crackers; juice of ½ lemon; toast; lettuce leaves

Why it works: Lemon and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,559 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Sardine Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Chop together sardines, pickles, and crackers.
Moisten the mixture with the juice of ½ lemon.
Serve on round pieces of toast as an appetizer or on lettuce leaves as a 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.

Lemon + lettucetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,559 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

Sardines: Provide the main body, savory flavor, and richness of the salad.
Sour pickles: Add acidity and a sharp, tangy bite that contrasts with the fish.
Crackers: Bind the chopped mixture and add a crisp, starchy texture.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity and brightness while moistening the mixture.

“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.