Name: Beet Salad
Ingredients: boiled beets; onion; lettuce leaves; Mayonnaise dressing

Why it works: Onion and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,562 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Beet Salad

Ingredients

boiled beets
onion
lettuce leaves
Mayonnaise dressing

Directions

Dice the boiled beets.
Grate a little onion over the diced beets.
Arrange the mixture on lettuce leaves.
Cover with mayonnaise 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.

Onion + lettucetop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,562 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

Boiled beets: Provide the main body, sweetness and earthy colour of the salad.
Onion: Adds sharp, pungent aroma that contrasts with the sweetness of the beets.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds fat and creaminess, coating the beets and softening their flavour.

“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.