Name: Savoury Pear Salad
Ingredients: 3 preserved pears; 1 tablespoon walnuts, minced; 1 tablespoon pecan nuts, minced; lemon juice, to taste; mayonnaise sauce, to taste; watercress, for salad; inner stalk of celery, chopped; beetroot, chopped; single lettuce leaves, for serving

Why it works: Watercress and beetroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 143 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Savoury Pear Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Drain the preserved pears from the syrup.
Blanch and mince the walnuts and pecan nuts.

Assemble

Roll the pear halves in the minced nuts and sprinkle with lemon juice.
Mix the chopped celery, beetroot, and mayonnaise together.
Serve the mixture on single lettuce leaves.
Top each lettuce leaf with a nut-encrusted pear.

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 + beetroottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together143 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Lemon + watercresstop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together579 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Lemon + celerytop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,467 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Walnut + beetroottop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together137 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Walnut + watercresstop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together71 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

Preserved pears: Provide the sweet, soft fruit base that the salad is built around.
Walnuts: Add crunch and a toasty, slightly bitter flavour to the pear coating.
Pecan nuts: Add crunch and a buttery, rich flavour to the pear coating.
Mayonnaise sauce: Adds fat and creaminess that binds the celery and beetroot mixture.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the sweet pears and helps slow browning on their cut surfaces.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pear, walnut, lemon, sauce, watercress, celery, beetroot):

Chestnutfits better
Hazelnutfits better
Cashew nutfits better
Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, walnut, lemon, sauce, watercress, celery, beetroot. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.