Name: Tomato and Lettuce Salad
Ingredients: 3 tomatoes, sliced; Lettuce; Mayonnaise dressing

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 and Lettuce Salad

Ingredients

3 tomatoes, sliced
Lettuce
Mayonnaise dressing

Directions

Prepare a salad with lettuce.
Slice the tomatoes and lay them on top of the lettuce.
Cover the entire salad with mayonnaise 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.

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes: Add juicy acidity and fresh flavour, with a soft texture against the crisp lettuce.
Lettuce: Forms the crisp base of the salad and carries the toppings.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds fat and creaminess, coating the salad and mellowing the tomato acidity.

“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.