Name: Japanese Salad
Ingredients: tender cooked beets; boiled rice; chopped apple; chopped celery; chopped pecan meats; cream cheese; French dressing; crisp lettuce leaves

Why it works: Celery and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,033 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Japanese Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Hollow out the cooked beets to create cups.
In a bowl, mix the boiled rice, chopped apple, chopped celery, and chopped pecan meats.
Fill each beet cup with the rice mixture.
Top each cup with a small ball of cream cheese.
Drizzle French dressing over the salad.
Serve each filled beet cup on a crisp lettuce leaf.

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.

Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Rice + celerytop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,169 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Rice + lettucetop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together520 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Apple + celerytop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,155 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).
Rice + meattop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,481 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, celery, meat, cream cheese, lettuce):

Avocadofits better
Coconutfits better
Limefits better
Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, celery, meat, cream cheese, lettuce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.