Name: Tomato Salad
Ingredients: medium sized tomatoes; curled lettuce leaves; thick salad 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 Salad

Ingredients

medium sized tomatoes
curled lettuce leaves
thick salad dressing

Directions

Peel the medium-sized tomatoes and chill them on ice.
Place a curled lettuce leaf in each individual dish.
Set a chilled tomato on the lettuce leaf and top with a spoonful of thick salad 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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: Provide the main fresh body and juicy flavour of the salad.
Curled lettuce leaves: Form a crisp, cool base that holds the tomato in place.
Thick salad dressing: Adds richness and tang that contrasts with the cold tomato.

“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.