Name: Tomato and Cheese Salad
Ingredients: Tomatoes; Cream cheese; Heavy cream; Paprika; Coarse sea salt; Chopped parsley; Lettuce leaves; French dressing or mayonnaise

Why it works: Parsley and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,483 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Tomato and Cheese Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Peel and slice the tomatoes.
In a bowl, mix cream cheese with a little heavy cream, paprika, and coarse sea salt.
Form the mixture into small balls and roll them in chopped parsley.
Arrange the cheese balls in a pyramid shape on the tomato slices.
Place the tomato slices on lettuce leaves and serve with French dressing or mayonnaise.

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.

Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,483 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Tomato + lettucetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,655 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Tomato + parsleytop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,398 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Cream cheese + creamtop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,087 recipes

Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).
Cream cheese + lettucetop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together213 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, cream cheese, cream, lettuce):

Capersfits better
Tarragonfits better
Celeryfits better
Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, cream cheese, cream, lettuce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.