Name: Cucumber Salad
Ingredients: 1 cucumber; Equal parts of sweetbreads, cucumbers, and English walnuts; Mayonnaise; Lettuce leaves; 1 radish; 1 peeled tomato; 1 thin slice of new onion or a few sprigs of chives; 2 stalks of tender celery; Bearnaise sauce or French dressing

Why it works: Cucumber and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,409 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cucumber Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Peel the cucumber and place it in ice water.
Cut the cucumber into 3-inch lengths and scoop out the inside to form cups.
Mix equal parts of sweetbreads, cucumbers, and English walnuts with mayonnaise.
Fill the cucumber cups with the salad mixture and set on lettuce leaves.
Top each salad with a teaspoon of mayonnaise and a radish cut to resemble a rose.
For the second salad, pare and chill a cucumber, cut it in half lengthwise, and remove the seeds.
Dry the cucumber halves and fill with a mixture of chopped tomato, onion or chives, and celery.
Mix with Bearnaise sauce or French 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.

Cucumber + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,409 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Cucumber + radishtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together212 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together491 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Lettuce + radishtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together58 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Cucumber + tomatotop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,405 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cucumber, walnut, lettuce, radish, tomato, celery, sauce):

Mustardfits better
Beetrootfits better
Endivefits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cucumber, walnut, lettuce, radish, tomato, celery, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.