Name: Tomato and Lettuce Salad
Ingredients: tomatoes; crisp lettuce leaves; finely crushed ice; mayonnaise; French dressing (optional)

Why it works: Tomato and lettuce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,655 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Tomato and Lettuce Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Carefully peel the tomatoes and cut them in half.
Arrange the crisp lettuce leaves on a cold dish.
Place half a tomato on each lettuce leaf.
Scatter finely crushed ice over the tomatoes and lettuce.

Serve

Fill a glass bowl with mayonnaise and pour a ladleful over each piece of tomato when serving.
Alternatively, serve with French dressing and omit the lettuce.

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.

Tomato + lettucetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,655 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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes: Provide the juicy, acidic base that forms the body of the salad.
Crisp lettuce leaves: Provide a crisp, cool bed that holds the tomato halves.
Mayonnaise: Adds richness and fat that softens the tomato's acidity.

“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.