Name: Cucumber and Tomato Salad
Ingredients: 2 shallots; 2 cucumbers; ⅓ cup sliced ripe tomatoes; ½ lemon; pepper; coarse sea salt; fresh parsley; oil; vinegar

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Cucumber and Tomato Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and assemble

Finely chop the shallots and sprinkle them in a salad dish.
Peel and slice the cucumbers into thin slices.
Layer the cucumber slices with one-third of the sliced tomatoes in the dish.
Squeeze half a lemon over the salad and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

Garnish and serve

Mix gently and garnish with thin lemon slices, cucumber, and tomato.
Sprinkle with freshly chopped parsley and dress with oil and vinegar before serving.

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.

Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together14,037 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,737 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together34,122 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Shallot + cucumbertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together264 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumbers: Provide the crisp, watery bulk that makes up most of the salad.
Ripe tomatoes: Add juicy moisture and a sweet, acidic flavor to the salad.
Shallots: Contribute a sharp, savory onion flavor that mellows in the dressing.
Lemon: Adds bright acidity that balances the sweetness of the vegetables.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (shallot, cucumber, lemon, pepper, parsley, vinegar):

Chivefits better
Kalefits better
Radishfits better
Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against shallot, cucumber, lemon, pepper, parsley, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.