Name: Watercress Salad
Ingredients: watercress; coarse sea salt; black pepper; lemon juice or vinegar; sugar (optional)

Why it works: Watercress and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 579 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Watercress Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the watercress

Select the best bunches of watercress.
Remove the heavy stalks.
Clean and dry the watercress in a napkin.
Place the watercress in a salad bowl.

Dress and serve

Dress with coarse sea salt, black pepper, and lemon juice or vinegar.
Add a little sugar if desired.

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.

Watercress + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together579 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Watercress + peppertop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together983 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together53,532 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Watercress + sugartop 30% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together207 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Watercress: Provides the leafy base and fresh, peppery flavour of the salad.
Lemon juice or vinegar: Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the peppery leaves.

“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.