Name: Sorrel Salad
Ingredients: young tender sorrel; olive oil; vinegar; mayonnaise; chili; tender lettuces; tarragon (optional); green onions or shallots (optional)

Why it works: Sorrel and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 317 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Sorrel Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Take young tender sorrel from the stems, wash it gently, and drain well.
Shake the sorrel dry in a salad basket or a soft cloth.
Arrange the sorrel lightly in a bowl.
Just before serving, dress the salad with olive oil and a small amount of vinegar, or with mayonnaise mixed with chili.
Optionally, mix the sorrel with an equal amount of tender lettuces and sprinkle with tarragon.
For added flavor, you can include a small amount of green onions or shallots.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Sorrel + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together317 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Sorrel + tarragontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together75 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Lettuce + tarragontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together425 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Olive + lettucetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,580 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Vinegar + tarragontop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,547 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Swap the tarragon

The recipe marks tarragon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sorrel, olive, vinegar, lettuce, onion):

Capersfits better
Tarragonthe original
Garlicfits about as well
Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sorrel, olive, vinegar, lettuce, onion. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.