Name: Pear Salad
Ingredients: 1/2 pear per person; lettuce leaves; mayonnaise dressing

Why it works: Pear and lettuce share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Pear Salad

Ingredients

1/2 pear per person
lettuce leaves
mayonnaise dressing

Directions

Place a half pear on a bed of lettuce leaves for each person.
Serve with mayonnaise 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.

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.

Pear + lettucetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together92 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

Pear: Provides sweet, juicy fruit flavour and a soft contrast to the crisp lettuce.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds richness and fat that carries a creamy, savoury coating over the fruit.

“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.