Name: Cheese Salad
Ingredients: cottage cheese; shredded lettuce; thick salad dressing; crescent olives

Why it works: Lettuce and olive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,580 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Cheese Salad

Ingredients

cottage cheese
shredded lettuce
thick salad dressing
crescent olives

Directions

Form small cakes from the cottage cheese.
Place the cakes in a bed of shredded lettuce.
Cover the cheese cakes with thick salad dressing.
Garnish with crescent olives.

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 + olivetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,580 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Cottage cheese + olivetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together205 recipes

Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (apple, fatty).
Cottage cheese + lettucetop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85 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

Cottage cheese: Forms the main body of the salad as shaped cakes, providing soft, mild, creamy texture.
Shredded lettuce: Provides a crisp, fresh base that contrasts with the soft cheese cakes.
Thick salad dressing: Adds moisture, richness and tang that coat the cheese cakes.