Name: Sauce Vinaigrette
Ingredients: ½ cup plain French dressing; ¼ onion, finely chopped; 1 teaspoon chopped parsley or pickle

Why it works: Onion and parsley are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25,843 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Sauce Vinaigrette

Ingredients

½ cup plain French dressing
¼ onion, finely chopped
1 teaspoon chopped parsley or pickle

Directions

Mix the plain French dressing with the finely chopped onion.
Add the chopped parsley or pickle and stir well.

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.

Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together25,843 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Plain french dressing: Provides the oil and acid base that carries the flavour of the sauce.
Onion: Adds sharp, aromatic bite that cuts through the richness of the dressing.
Parsley or pickle: Adds fresh herbal or tangy notes that brighten the sauce.

“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.