Name: Carrot Salad
Ingredients: 8 carrots, diced; 3 raw tomatoes, sliced; 1 handful of watercress, small branches; 1 onion, minced; ½ pint mayonnaise dressing; Lettuce leaves, for serving; Capers, for garnish

Why it works: Watercress and capers share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 60 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Carrot Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Dice the carrots and slice the tomatoes.
Add the watercress and minced onion to the bowl.

Dress and serve

Mix in the mayonnaise dressing until well combined.
Serve on a bed of lettuce leaves and garnish with capers.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + caperstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together60 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together307 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together372 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,606 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Carrot + lettucetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together976 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Carrots: Provide the crisp, sweet bulk of the salad.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds fat and creaminess that coats the vegetables and binds them together.
Tomatoes: Add juiciness and a mild acidity that brightens the salad.
Onion: Adds sharp, pungent flavour that cuts through the richness of the dressing.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, watercress, onion, lettuce, capers):

Beetrootfits better
Turnipfits better
Shallotfits better
Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, watercress, onion, lettuce, capers. 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.