Name: Romaine Salad
Ingredients: 1 heart of Romaine; ½ pint of cream; pepper to taste; coarse sea salt to taste

Why it works: Cream and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 21,449 recipes. Both carry acetic acid, which smells sour, vinegar. The science ↓

Romaine Salad

Ingredients

1 heart of Romaine
½ pint of cream
pepper to taste
coarse sea salt to taste

Directions

Take the heart of a Romaine and wipe it with a clean towel; do not wash.
In a bowl, mix the cream with pepper and coarse sea salt to taste.
Serve the Romaine with the cream mixture; no dressing is needed.

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.

Cream + peppertop 23% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together21,449 recipes

Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Cream and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 21,449 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Romaine heart: Provides the crisp, watery leaves that make up the salad's body.
Cream: Adds richness and a smooth fat coating that serves as the dressing.

“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.