Name: Bologna Salad
Ingredients: Bologna sausage; hard-boiled eggs; shredded lettuce; beetroot; celery; tartare sauce; chopped parsley

Why it works: Lettuce and beetroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 678 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Bologna Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Cut the Bologna sausage into thin slices and remove the skin.
Arrange the sausage in circular rows on a serving dish, alternating with slices of hard-boiled egg.
Prepare a salad with shredded lettuce, beetroot, and celery, seasoned with tartare sauce.
Fill the center of the dish with the salad, heaping it high.
Sprinkle with chopped parsley 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.

Lettuce + beetroottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together678 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Lettuce + parsleytop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,483 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together745 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, lettuce, beetroot, sauce, parsley):

Capersfits better
Tarragonfits better
Dillfits better
Celerythe original

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