Name: Lettuce and Grape Fruit Salad
Ingredients: 1 head of lettuce; 1 grapefruit; French dressing

Why it works: Lettuce and grapefruit match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Lettuce and Grape Fruit Salad

Ingredients

1 head of lettuce
1 grapefruit
French dressing

Directions

Prepare

Tear the washed lettuce into pieces.
Pare and divide the grapefruit into segments.
With a knife, slit the white skin around each segment, bend it back, and remove the fruit pieces and seeds.

Assemble and serve

Pour the grapefruit and its juice over the lettuce.
Serve with 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.

Lettuce + grapefruittop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together118 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 crisp, leafy base that the fruit and dressing are served over.
Grapefruit: Adds tart, juicy flavour and bright acidity that balances the dressing.
French dressing: Adds sweet-tart seasoning and moisture to coat the leaves and fruit.

“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.