Name: Tomato and Watercress Salad
Ingredients: watercress; sliced tomatoes; French dressing or mayonnaise dressing

Why it works: Watercress and tomato work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 158 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Tomato and Watercress Salad

Ingredients

watercress
sliced tomatoes
French dressing or mayonnaise dressing

Directions

Wash the watercress thoroughly and dry it.
Mix the watercress with an equal amount of sliced tomatoes.
Dress with French dressing or mayonnaise.

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.

Watercress + tomatotop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together158 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Watercress: Provides a crisp texture and a peppery, fresh flavour that contrasts with the tomatoes.
Sliced tomatoes: Adds juiciness and a mild acidity that brightens the salad.

“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.