Name: Herring Salad
Ingredients: 6 Milchner herrings; milk; beets; celery root; vinegar pickles; olives; capers; apples; mayonnaise or French dressing

Why it works: Olive and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,688 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Herring Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Soak the herrings in milk overnight.
Skin and finely chop the herrings.
Rub the chopped herring to a cream and press through a sieve.
Cook beets and celery root, then cut into small cubes.
Chop the vinegar pickles, olives, and capers, and add to the herring mixture.
Scoop out apples, chop some, and add to the salad.
Mix all ingredients with mayonnaise or French dressing.
Serve the salad in the scooped-out apples.

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.

Olive + caperstop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,688 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together405 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Celery + olivetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,667 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Vinegar + olivetop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,297 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).
Celery + appletop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,155 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

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

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, celery, vinegar, olive, capers):

Lemonfits better
Avocadofits better
Cherryfits better
Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, celery, vinegar, olive, capers. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.