Name: Plain Cucumber Salad
Ingredients: 1 cucumber; Lettuce leaves (optional); Plain French Dressing

Why it works: Cucumber and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,409 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Plain Cucumber Salad

Ingredients

1 cucumber
Lettuce leaves (optional)
Plain French Dressing

Directions

Peel and slice the cucumber crosswise into thin slices.
Arrange the slices on chilled plates with or without lettuce leaves.
Serve with Plain French 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.

Cucumber + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,409 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Cucumber: Forms the crisp, cool, watery body of the salad.
Plain french dressing: Adds acidity and fat that season the cucumber slices and carry flavour.

“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.