Name: Apple Salad
Ingredients: 3 cups diced apple; 1 medium apple; ½ teaspoon mayonnaise; Lettuce for serving

Why it works: Apple and lettuce work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 515 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Apple Salad

Ingredients

3 cups diced apple
1 medium apple
½ teaspoon mayonnaise
Lettuce for serving

Directions

Dice the apple and celery.
Remove the core of the medium apple with a spoon and dice it.
Mix the diced apple with celery and mayonnaise.
Fill the hollowed apple with the mixture.
Serve on a bed of 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.

Apple + lettucetop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together515 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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