Name: French Chicken Salad
Ingredients: remains of cold roast or boiled chicken; 2 heads of lettuce; a little endive; 1 cucumber; a few slices of boiled beetroot; hard boiled eggs; salad dressing

Why it works: Lettuce and endive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 284 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

French Chicken Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Trim the remains of the chicken.
Wash, dry, and slice the lettuces, then place them in the middle of a dish.
Put the pieces of chicken on top of the lettuce.
Pour the salad dressing over the chicken.
Garnish the edge of the salad with hard boiled egg rings, sliced cucumber, and sliced beetroot.
Alternatively, rub the yolks of the eggs through a sieve and chop the whites finely, arranging them on the salad in small bunches.

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 + endivetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together284 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together678 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Endive + beetroottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together132 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,409 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together87 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

Swap the cucumber

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, lettuce, endive, beetroot, egg):

Spinachfits better
Chivefits better
Leekfits better
Cucumberthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, lettuce, endive, beetroot, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.