Name: Cherry Salad
Ingredients: Lettuce leaves; Cherries; Hazelnuts; Mayonnaise dressing; 1 tablespoon cherry juice

Why it works: Lettuce and hazelnut share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 21 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cherry Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Arrange lettuce leaves on a flat dish.
Seed the cherries and place a hazelnut in the center of each to keep their shape.
Insert the cherries through the leaves.

Dress and serve

Pour mayonnaise dressing mixed with cherry juice over the salad.
Garnish with a few cherries on top.

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 + hazelnuttop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together21 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together242 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Hazelnut + cherrytop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together58 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Cherries: Provide the sweet, juicy fruit that gives the salad its main flavor and color.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds fat and creaminess, coating the leaves and cherries with a rich texture.
Hazelnuts: Fill the cherry centers, adding a crunchy, nutty contrast to the soft fruit.