Name: Italian Salad
Ingredients: 1 cup cold chicken meat; 1 cold carrot; 1 cold turnip; 12 mushrooms; ½ cup asparagus tips; ½ cup Brussels sprouts; Lettuce leaves; Mayonnaise

Why it works: Turnip and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 526 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Italian Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Cut the carrot, turnip, and chicken into 1-inch strips. Mix lightly with a fork.

Assemble and serve

Arrange in a nest of lettuce leaves on a flat dish.
Moisten well with mayonnaise and mask the top with a few spoonfuls.
Garnish with clusters of mushrooms, asparagus tips, and Brussels sprouts.

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.

Turnip + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together526 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,002 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Asparagus + lettucetop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together313 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Turnip + asparagustop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together328 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Chicken + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,172 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-butyl acetate (fruity, banana).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold chicken meat: Forms the main body of the salad, giving it substance and protein-based bite.
Mayonnaise: Adds fat and moisture, coating the vegetables and chicken so the salad stays moist.
Carrot: Adds crisp texture and mild sweetness to the mixed salad.
Turnip: Adds crunch and a slightly peppery freshness to the salad.

Swap the brussels sprouts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, meat, carrot, turnip, mushroom, asparagus, lettuce):

Leekfits better
Spinachfits better
Shallotfits better
Brussels sproutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, meat, carrot, turnip, mushroom, asparagus, lettuce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.