Name: Southern Salad
Ingredients: hearts of young lettuces; mayonnaise dressing; white or red rose leaves; English violets

Why it works: Lettuce and rose work together. They rank in the top 28% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Southern Salad

Ingredients

hearts of young lettuces
mayonnaise dressing
white or red rose leaves
English violets

Directions

Choose the hearts only of young lettuces and pile them high in your salad bowl.
Pour mayonnaise dressing over the lettuce.
Scatter white or red rose leaves over the salad.
Place a handful of English violets on top.
Serve some of the flowers with 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.

Lettuce + rosetop 28% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together20 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

Hearts of young lettuces: Provide the crisp, tender leafy base of the salad.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds fat and richness, coating the leaves with a creamy texture.
White or red rose leaves: Add a delicate, fragrant aroma and a soft petal texture.
English violets: Add a floral aroma and a decorative, delicate 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.