Name: Corned Beef Salad
Ingredients: 1 pound corned beef, diced; 1 tablespoon freshly grated horseradish; French dressing; Watercress

Why it works: Horseradish and watercress share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 66 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Corned Beef Salad

Ingredients

1 pound corned beef, diced
1 tablespoon freshly grated horseradish
French dressing
Watercress

Directions

Prepare

Dice the corned beef into small pieces.
Mix the diced beef with the horseradish and marinate with French dressing.

Serve

Serve the mixture on a bed of watercress.
Pass additional French dressing alongside.

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.

Horseradish + watercresstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together66 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Beef + horseradishtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together491 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).
Beef + watercresstop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together94 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

What each ingredient does

Corned beef: Provides the main savoury, salty meat base of the salad.
Horseradish: Adds sharp, pungent heat that cuts through the richness of the beef.
French dressing: Adds acidity and moisture, flavouring and softening the diced beef as it marinates.

“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.