Name: Cucumber and Onion Salad
Ingredients: 2 cucumbers; 2 new onions; Sour Cream Dressing, French Dressing, or Cheese Dressing

Why it works: Cucumber and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,050 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cucumber and Onion Salad

Ingredients

2 cucumbers
2 new onions
Sour Cream Dressing, French Dressing, or Cheese Dressing

Directions

Peel the cucumbers and slice them thinly.
Mix the sliced cucumbers with finely sliced new onions.
Dress the salad with your choice of Sour Cream Dressing, French Dressing, or Cheese 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.

Cucumber + oniontop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,050 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Onion + creamtop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together10,827 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).
Cucumber + creamtop 29% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together787 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

Onion and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,827 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

Cucumbers: Provide the crisp, watery bulk that makes up most of the salad.
New onions: Add sharp, aromatic flavour that balances the mild, cool cucumber.