Name: Tomato-and-artichoke Salad
Ingredients: medium-sized tomatoes; coarse sea salt; artichoke hearts; mayonnaise; tarragon vinegar; lettuce leaves

Why it works: Artichoke and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 101 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Tomato-and-artichoke Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Peel the tomatoes and cut a slice from the stem end.
Remove the seeds with a small spoon and sprinkle the insides with salt.
Set the tomatoes on ice to chill.
Cook the artichoke hearts in salted boiling water until just tender, then drain and cool.
Dice the cooled artichokes and mix with mayonnaise and tarragon vinegar.
Wipe the tomatoes dry and fill them with the artichoke mixture.
Serve the filled tomatoes on lettuce leaves.

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.

Artichoke + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together101 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Tarragon + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together425 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Artichoke + tarragontop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together60 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Tomato + tarragontop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together391 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Tomato + lettucetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,655 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (artichoke, tarragon, vinegar, lettuce):

Beetrootfits better
Shallotfits better
Mustardfits better
Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against artichoke, tarragon, vinegar, lettuce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.