Name: Tunny Fish Salad
Ingredients: Tunny fish, cut into small pieces; Oil from the fish; Mayonnaise dressing; Crisp lettuce leaves

Why it works: Fish and lettuce work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 196 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Tunny Fish Salad

Ingredients

Tunny fish, cut into small pieces
Oil from the fish
Mayonnaise dressing
Crisp lettuce leaves

Directions

Mix the cut tunny fish with the oil from the fish and mayonnaise dressing until thoroughly combined.
Serve the mixture on crisp lettuce leaves.

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.

Fish + lettucetop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together196 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Tunny fish: Provides the main protein and flaky body of the salad.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds fat and moisture, binding the fish into a creamy, cohesive mixture.
Oil from the fish: Carries flavour and adds richness, helping the fish stay moist when mixed with the dressing.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.