Name: Corn Salad
Ingredients: 2 cups cold boiled sweet corn, cut from the cob; ¼ teaspoon ground mustard; ½ tablespoon grated onion; French dressing; Endive, cress, or lettuce hearts for serving; Bacon sauce for serving

Why it works: Mustard and endive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 121 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Corn Salad

Ingredients

2 cups cold boiled sweet corn, cut from the cob
¼ teaspoon ground mustard
½ tablespoon grated onion
French dressing
Endive, cress, or lettuce hearts for serving
Bacon sauce for serving

Directions

Make the salad

In a bowl, combine the cold boiled sweet corn, ground mustard, and grated onion.
Marinate with French dressing and let it stand for one hour.
Drain the mixture and arrange it on a bed of endive, cress, or lettuce hearts.

Serve

Serve with bacon sauce.

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.

Mustard + endivetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together121 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Mustard + oniontop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,259 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Onion + endivetop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together214 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Corn + mustardtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together463 recipes

Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).
Corn + oniontop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,205 recipes

Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet corn: Forms the bulk of the salad, providing its main texture and sweetness.
Grated onion: Adds sharp, aromatic flavor that contrasts with the sweet corn.
Ground mustard: Adds a pungent, sharp note that balances the sweetness of the corn.