Name: Chicken Salad
Ingredients: Cold chicken; Olives; Capers; 3 eggs; Lettuce or celery; 1 tablespoon oil; 1 teaspoon vinegar; ¼ teaspoon salt; ¼ teaspoon pepper

Why it works: Capers and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 372 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Chicken Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Remove fat, skin, and bone from the cold chicken, then cut it into half-inch dice.
Trim and wash the lettuce or celery, break it into small pieces, and dry it on a clean towel.
In a salad bowl, mix the chicken and salad, then dress with oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper.
Prepare mayonnaise as directed in the Cardinal Sauce recipe, omitting the beet coloring, and cover the salad with it.
Decorate the salad with olives, capers, and hard-boiled eggs cut into quarters.

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.

Capers + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together372 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Olive + caperstop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,688 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,580 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Chicken + olivetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,888 recipes

Shared aroma: acetic acid hexyl ester (sweet, green).
Lettuce + peppertop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,037 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

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, olive, capers, egg, vinegar, pepper):

Mustardfits better
Capsicumfits better
Shallotfits better
Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, olive, capers, egg, vinegar, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.