Name: Orange and Watercress Salad
Ingredients: large oranges; watercress; French dressing; English walnuts

Why it works: Watercress and walnut share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 71 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Orange and Watercress Salad

Ingredients

large oranges
watercress
French dressing
English walnuts

Directions

Wash the oranges and remove the skins in quarter sections.
Pare off the tough white skins with a very sharp knife.
Cut the sections from the membrane that separates them.
Arrange the orange sections on the watercress, radiating from the center.
Pour French dressing over the salad.
Garnish with English walnuts.

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.

Watercress + walnuttop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together71 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Orange + watercresstop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Orange + walnuttop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,058 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).