Name: Dandelion Salad
Ingredients: dandelions; watercress; onion juice; French dressing

Why it works: Dandelion and watercress share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Dandelion Salad

Ingredients

dandelions
watercress
onion juice
French dressing

Directions

Cut dandelions low to get white stalks.
Wash dandelions thoroughly.
Mix dandelions with an equal quantity of watercress and a few drops of onion juice.
Dress the salad with French dressing.

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.

Dandelion + watercresstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together20 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Watercress + oniontop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together533 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Dandelion + oniontop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together52 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Dandelions: Provide the bitter, leafy base of the salad and its main texture.
Watercress: Adds peppery flavour and crisp, tender leaves to the bulk of the salad.
Onion juice: Adds a sharp, aromatic bite that lifts the flavour of the greens.
French dressing: Coats the leaves with oil and acid, adding moisture, fat and tang.