Name: English Salad
Ingredients: 1 lb nice red tomatoes; 2 hard-boiled eggs; watercress; salad dressing (see page 166); 2 or 3 lettuces

Why it works: Watercress and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 307 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

English Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Dip tomatoes in boiling water for 2 minutes, then skin and cut into neat pieces.
Wash the salad plants and dry them with a cloth; break into nice pieces.

Assemble and serve

Cut the eggs into eighths and arrange the salad in a bowl with any leftover egg pieces.
Garnish with tomatoes and egg.
Pour salad dressing over the salad or serve it separately.

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 + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together307 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Tomato + lettucetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,655 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Tomato + watercresstop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together158 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Egg + watercresstop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together638 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).
Egg + lettucetop 30% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,301 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Red tomatoes: Provide fresh juicy body and bright acidity as the main salad vegetable.
Hard-boiled eggs: Add rich, creamy texture and substance as a garnish.
Lettuces: Form the crisp, leafy base that holds the other salad parts.