Name: A French Dressing for Lettuce
Ingredients: juice of 2 lemons; 2 tablespoons olive oil; 1 teaspoon salt; paprika to taste

Why it works: Lemon and olive are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,922 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

A French Dressing for Lettuce

Ingredients

juice of 2 lemons
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
paprika to taste

Directions

Combine the juice of 2 lemons, olive oil, salt, and paprika in a bowl.
Whisk until well blended.

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.

Lemon + olivetop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,922 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Lemon juice: Provides the acidity that gives the dressing its bright, sharp flavour.
Olive oil: Supplies fat that carries flavour and gives the dressing body.

“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.