Name: Sour Orange Salad
Ingredients: 4 sour oranges; Lettuce leaves; Mayonnaise dressing

Why it works: Orange and lettuce work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 373 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Sour Orange Salad

Ingredients

4 sour oranges
Lettuce leaves
Mayonnaise dressing

Directions

Peel and slice the sour oranges.
Arrange the orange slices on lettuce leaves.
Cover with mayonnaise dressing and serve.

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.

Orange + lettucetop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together373 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Sour oranges: Provide the sharp, acidic citrus flavour that contrasts with the rich dressing.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds richness and fat that softens the acidity of the oranges.
Lettuce leaves: Form a crisp, cool base that holds the orange slices.

“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.