Name: Cherry Salad
Ingredients: large white canned cherries; pecan meat; lettuce hearts; French dressing or mayonnaise

Why it works: Meat and lettuce work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 579 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Cherry Salad

Ingredients

large white canned cherries
pecan meat
lettuce hearts
French dressing or mayonnaise

Directions

Prepare

Remove the stones from the canned cherries.
Insert half of a pecan meat into each cherry.

Assemble and serve

Arrange the cherries on lettuce hearts.
Serve with French dressing or mayonnaise.

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.

Meat + lettucetop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together579 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Large white canned cherries: Provide the sweet, juicy fruit that forms the main body of the salad.
Pecan meat: Adds a crunchy texture and a rich, nutty contrast to the soft fruit.
Lettuce hearts: Give a crisp, cool base that holds the cherries in place.
French dressing or mayonnaise: Adds moisture and fat, coating the salad and balancing the fruit's sweetness.

“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.