Name: Brussels-sprouts Salad
Ingredients: cooked cold brussels sprouts; coarse sea salt; black pepper; olive oil; vinegar; Tabasco sauce; lettuce leaves; chopped parsley or chives

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Brussels-sprouts Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Season the cooked cold brussels sprouts with coarse sea salt and black pepper.
Dress the sprouts with olive oil, vinegar, and a few drops of Tabasco sauce.
Line a salad bowl with lettuce leaves.
Place the dressed brussels sprouts on top of the lettuce.
Sprinkle with chopped parsley or chives and serve.

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.

Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,483 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,580 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Olive + parsleytop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,649 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Pepper + lettucetop 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 brussels sprouts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, olive, vinegar, sauce, lettuce, parsley):

Mustardfits better
Capsicumfits better
Shallotfits better
Brussels sproutsthe original

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