Name: Salmon Salad
Ingredients: 1 cup flaked salmon; 1 head crisp lettuce; mayonnaise; aspic for garnish

Why it works: Salmon and lettuce work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 487 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Salmon Salad

Ingredients

1 cup flaked salmon
1 head crisp lettuce
mayonnaise
aspic for garnish

Directions

Lay the flaked salmon on a bed of crisp lettuce.
Create a border with the lettuce leaves.
Mask the salmon with mayonnaise.
Garnish with aspic.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Salmon + lettucetop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together487 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Flaked salmon: Provides the main body and flavor of the salad.
Crisp lettuce: Forms a crisp bed and border that holds the salmon in place.
Mayonnaise: Adds fat and creaminess, coating the salmon with moisture and richness.

“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.