Name: Banana Salad
Ingredients: 1 banana, sliced; 1 lettuce leaf; 2 teaspoons mayonnaise

Why it works: Banana and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 198 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Banana Salad

Ingredients

1 banana, sliced
1 lettuce leaf
2 teaspoons mayonnaise

Directions

Place one-half of a sliced banana on each lettuce leaf.
Top with a small amount of mayonnaise.

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.

Banana + lettucetop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together198 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Banana: Provides natural sweetness and a soft, creamy texture that contrasts with the crisp lettuce.
Mayonnaise: Adds fat and richness, giving a creamy moisture that binds the salad together.

“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.