Name: Baked Apple Salad
Ingredients: apples; mayonnaise dressing; lettuce leaves; stewed prunes

Why it works: Apple and lettuce work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 515 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Baked Apple Salad

Ingredients

apples
mayonnaise dressing
lettuce leaves
stewed prunes

Directions

Peel, core, and bake the apples until tender.
Place one baked apple on a lettuce leaf.
Fill the cavity of the apple with mayonnaise dressing.
Serve stewed prunes, drained and pitted, on heart leaves of lettuce 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.

Apple + lettucetop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together515 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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