Name: Mixed Vegetable or Macedoine Salad
Ingredients: Cold cooked peas; Carrots; Beets; String beans; Celery; French dressing; Radishes (for garnish); Celery tips (for garnish); Lettuce leaves (for garnish)

Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Mixed Vegetable or Macedoine Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Cut beets and carrots into ½-inch cubes.
Cut string beans and celery into short lengths.
Mix each vegetable separately with French dressing.
Arrange the vegetables in sections to form a circular mound.
Place contrasting colors of vegetables next to each other.
Garnish with radishes, celery tips, and 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.

Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,173 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Beans + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together500 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Radish + lettucetop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together58 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Carrot + beanstop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,443 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, beans, celery, radish, lettuce):

Lentilsfits better
Chickpeafits better
Sesamefits better
Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, beans, celery, radish, lettuce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.