Name: Tomato Jelly with String Beans
Ingredients: tiny string beans; salt; onion juice; pepper; tarragon vinegar; oil; finely chopped pimento; lettuce leaves; chives (optional)

Why it works: Tarragon and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 425 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Tomato Jelly with String Beans

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the string beans in boiling salted water until tender.
Season the hot beans with onion juice, salt, pepper, and tarragon vinegar.
Let the beans cool, then coat them with oil.
Fill the center of a ring mold with the beans and sprinkle with finely chopped pimento.
Garnish with lettuce leaves. Optionally, use finely chopped chives instead of onion juice.

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.

Tarragon + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together425 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Lettuce + chivetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together261 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Tarragon + chivetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together589 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Beans + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together500 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Beans + chivetop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together180 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Swap the chive

The recipe marks chive as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, onion, pepper, tarragon, vinegar, lettuce):

Mustardfits better
Beetrootfits about as well
Chivethe original
Shallotfits about as well

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