Name: Beet Salad
Ingredients: beets; cucumbers or celery; lettuce leaves; mayonnaise dressing

Why it works: Cucumber and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,409 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Beet Salad

Ingredients

beets
cucumbers or celery
lettuce leaves
mayonnaise dressing

Directions

Select beets of even size and boil until tender.
Cool the beets, then scoop out the centers and chop them.
Add tiny pieces of cucumbers or celery to the chopped beets.
Place the mixture on lettuce leaves.
Pour mayonnaise dressing over the salad.

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.

Cucumber + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,409 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