Name: Stuffed Beet Salad
Ingredients: medium-sized beets; vinegar; finely shredded celery; French peas; thick mayonnaise; pitted olives; radishes; small lettuce leaves

Why it works: Radish and lettuce share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 58 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Stuffed Beet Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the beets until well done, then remove the skins while warm.
Cut off a bit from the end so the beets can stand steadily on the plate.
Use a potato ball cutter to remove the center, leaving enough beet to form a thick cup.
Let the beets stand in vinegar for one hour.
Make a salad with the shredded celery, French peas, and mayonnaise.
Drain the beets and fill them with the celery salad.
Arrange the stuffed beets on a platter and garnish with olives, radishes cut into flower shapes, and small lettuce leaf hearts.

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.

Radish + lettucetop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together58 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Peas + lettucetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,293 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,580 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Celery + radishtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together101 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

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

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, celery, olive, radish, lettuce):

Sesamefits better
Beansfits better
Lentilsfits better
Peasthe original

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