Name: Nut and Lettuce Salad
Ingredients: 2 heads fresh crisp lettuce; 1 cup English walnuts; Mayonnaise dressing

Why it works: Lettuce and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 491 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Nut and Lettuce Salad

Ingredients

2 heads fresh crisp lettuce
1 cup English walnuts
Mayonnaise dressing

Directions

Prepare

Wash and shred the lettuce into fine pieces.
Chop the walnuts.
Combine the lettuce and walnuts.

Serve

Arrange the mixture in the center of the lettuce leaves.
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.

Lettuce + walnuttop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together491 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

Lettuce: Forms the bulk of the salad and provides crisp, moist texture.
Walnuts: Add crunch and a rich, nutty flavor that contrasts with the crisp lettuce.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds fat and creaminess that coats the lettuce and walnuts.

“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.