Name: Cucumber and Corn Salad
Ingredients: 1 cup cold cooked green corn; 1 cup cucumbers, sliced or cut into small pieces; mayonnaise to taste

Why it works: Corn and cucumber match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 387 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cucumber and Corn Salad

Ingredients

1 cup cold cooked green corn
1 cup cucumbers, sliced or cut into small pieces
mayonnaise to taste

Directions

Combine equal parts of cold cooked green corn and cucumbers in a bowl.
Add mayonnaise to taste and mix well.
Serve chilled.

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.

Corn + cucumbertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together387 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Cold cooked green corn: Provides the sweet, tender bulk of the salad.
Cucumbers: Adds crisp texture and a cool, watery freshness that contrasts with the corn.
Mayonnaise: Adds fat and creaminess, binding the corn and cucumber together.

“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.