Name: Lettuce Salad
Ingredients: 1 head of lettuce; mayonnaise dressing; 2 hard boiled eggs

Why it works: Lettuce and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,301 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Lettuce Salad

Ingredients

1 head of lettuce
mayonnaise dressing
2 hard boiled eggs

Directions

Prepare

Wash the lettuce thoroughly and pick over well.
Chop or cut the lettuce very fine.

Assemble

Add a nice amount of mayonnaise dressing.
Cut up the hard boiled eggs and mix in.

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 + eggtop 30% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,301 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Lettuce: Provides the crisp, fresh leafy base of the salad.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds fat and creaminess that coats the leaves and gives moisture and richness.
Hard boiled eggs: Add richness and a soft, creamy texture from the cooked yolks and whites.

“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.