Name: Cucumber and Tomato Salad
Ingredients: Crisp lettuce; Sliced cucumbers; Sliced tomatoes; French dressing

Why it works: Lettuce and cucumber match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,409 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cucumber and Tomato Salad

Ingredients

Crisp lettuce
Sliced cucumbers
Sliced tomatoes
French dressing

Directions

Assemble

Place a layer of crisp lettuce in a salad dish.
Add a layer of sliced cucumbers.
Add a layer of sliced tomatoes.

Dress and serve

Pour French dressing over the whole.

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.

Lettuce + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,409 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Cucumber + tomatotop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,405 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Lettuce + tomatotop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,655 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Crisp lettuce: Forms the crisp base layer that holds the cucumber and tomato slices.
Sliced cucumbers: Adds cool, crisp texture and fresh moisture to the salad.
Sliced tomatoes: Adds juiciness, acidity and a sweet-tart flavour to the layers.
French dressing: Adds acidity, oil and seasoning that coat the vegetables and add flavour.