Name: Tomato Salad
Ingredients: Tomatoes; Mayonnaise; Crisp lettuce leaves

Why it works: Tomato and lettuce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,655 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Tomato Salad

Ingredients

Tomatoes
Mayonnaise
Crisp lettuce leaves

Directions

Choose medium-sized tomatoes and peel them carefully with a sharp knife.
Set the peeled tomatoes on ice for 1 hour.
Use a corer or a sharp knife to remove a neat piece from the stem end of each tomato.
Fill the cavity of each tomato with mayonnaise, heaping it up.
Place the tomatoes on 3 or 4 crisp lettuce leaves with the points outward.
Serve one tomato to each person at the table.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Tomato + lettucetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,655 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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