Name: French Salad
Ingredients: endive (or young lettuces); fresh herbs (such as tarragon); salt; olive oil; vinegar

Why it works: Endive and tarragon share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 75 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

French Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Blanch the endive and wash it thoroughly.
Break the endive into small pieces using your fingers.
Shake the endive dry in a basket or fine cloth.
Arrange the endive in a salad bowl and sprinkle with minced herbs.
Dress the salad with salt, olive oil, and vinegar just before serving.

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.

Endive + tarragontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together75 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Endive + olivetop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together209 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Tarragon + vinegartop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,547 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Tarragon + olivetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,323 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Olive + vinegartop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,297 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).