Name: String Bean Salad
Ingredients: Plain boiled string beans; Curly lettuce leaves; French salad dressing; Radish

Why it works: Beans and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 500 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

String Bean Salad

Ingredients

Plain boiled string beans
Curly lettuce leaves
French salad dressing
Radish

Directions

Boil the string beans until tender, then leave them whole.
Chill the beans in the refrigerator until very cold.
Serve the chilled beans on curly lettuce leaves.
Pour French salad dressing over the beans.
Garnish with a rose made from a radish.

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.

Beans + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together500 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Lettuce + radishtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together58 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Beans + radishtop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together67 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).