Name: Chicken or Game Salad
Ingredients: cooked chicken, cut into pieces; 1 head of lettuce; watercress or mustard cress

Why it works: Lettuce and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 307 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Chicken or Game Salad

Ingredients

cooked chicken, cut into pieces
1 head of lettuce
watercress or mustard cress

Directions

Arrange the pieces of cooked chicken on a serving platter.
Tear the lettuce into bite-sized pieces and scatter over the chicken.
Add watercress or mustard cress on top for garnish.

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 + watercresstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together307 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Chicken + lettucetop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,421 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Chicken + watercresstop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together248 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).