Name: Mayonnaise of Chicken
Ingredients: 2 cooked chickens; Mayonnaise Sauce (see recipe No. 47); 1 head of Cos lettuce; sardines, scraped and boned; anchovies, washed, boned, and shredded; 2 hard-boiled eggs, quartered; 1 cucumber, sliced; 2 tomatoes, sliced

Why it works: Lettuce and cucumber match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,409 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Mayonnaise of Chicken

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chicken

Remove the skin from the hot chickens and cut them into neat fillets.
Once cooled, coat the fillets with Mayonnaise Sauce.

Assemble and serve

Cut the Cos lettuce into 1-inch pieces and arrange them in an oval shape on a flat dish.
Decorate the top with sardines, anchovies, hard-boiled egg quarters, cucumber slices, and tomato slices.
Arrange the chicken fillets neatly around the lettuce and pour a pint of Mayonnaise Sauce over the entire dish.

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 + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,409 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Cucumber + tomatotop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,405 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Lettuce + tomatotop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,655 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Chicken + tomatotop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,031 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Sauce + tomatotop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together5,469 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked chickens: Provides the main protein, cut into fillets that carry the dressing and form the body of the salad.
Mayonnaise sauce: Adds fat and moisture, coating the chicken and binding the flavours of the whole dish.
Cos lettuce: Forms the crisp base bed that holds the chicken and garnishes above it.
Hard-boiled eggs: Adds a firm, mild richness and texture as a decorative garnish.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, sauce, egg, cucumber, tomato):

Capsicumfits better
Asparagusfits about as well
Lettucethe original
Chivefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, sauce, egg, cucumber, tomato. 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.