Name: Fish Salad
Ingredients: cold boiled salmon or any cold boiled fish; lettuce; dressing of your choice

Why it works: Salmon and lettuce work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 487 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Fish Salad

Ingredients

cold boiled salmon or any cold boiled fish
lettuce
dressing of your choice

Directions

Arrange the cold boiled fish on a platter.
Place the lettuce around the fish.
Drizzle with your choice of 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.

Salmon + lettucetop 24% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together487 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

Cold boiled salmon or any cold boiled fish: Provides the main protein and the flaky, moist centrepiece of the salad.
Lettuce: Adds crisp texture and fresh, cooling contrast to the rich fish.
Dressing: Adds moisture, fat and acidity that bind the flavours together across the salad.

“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.