Name: Spring Salad
Ingredients: red radishes; cucumber; new onions; lettuce leaves; endive leaves; watercress; French dressing; cheese dressing

Why it works: Endive and watercress share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 45 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Spring Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Slice red radishes thinly without peeling.
Mix with equal parts of peeled and diced cucumber and very thinly sliced new onions.
Heap the mixture on lettuce leaves, endive leaves, or watercress.
Serve with 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.

Endive + watercresstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together45 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Lettuce + endivetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together284 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Lettuce + watercresstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together307 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Cucumber + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,409 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Radish + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together212 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (radish, cucumber, lettuce, endive, watercress, cheese):

Beetrootfits better
Mustardfits better
Chivefits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against radish, cucumber, lettuce, endive, watercress, cheese. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.