Name: Lettuce Salad
Ingredients: 1 head of lettuce; 1 head of endive; salad dressing

Why it works: Lettuce and endive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 284 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Lettuce Salad

Ingredients

1 head of lettuce
1 head of endive
salad dressing

Directions

Prepare the lettuce

Remove all outer leaves from the head of lettuce.
Separate the inside leaves from the stalk.
Soak the lettuce leaves in cold water for 30 minutes.
Place a clean napkin in a colander, add the lettuce, and shake to remove excess water.

Prepare the endive

For the endive, use only the yellow part.
Soak the yellow part of the endive in cold water.
Separate the endive leaves.
Wash the endive leaves twice.
Cut the endive leaves into 2‑inch pieces.

Assemble and serve

Put the lettuce in a salad dish.
Arrange the endive pieces on top of the lettuce.
Serve with salad dressing.

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 + endivetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together284 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Lettuce: Forms the crisp, leafy base of the salad and provides most of its volume.
Endive: Adds a slightly bitter, crisp contrast to the mild lettuce.

“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.