Name: Salad, Mayonnaise
Ingredients: 2 or more French lettuces; Mayonnaise sauce; hard-boiled eggs, cut in quarters; pickled gherkins, sliced; stoned olives; ½ teaspoon French capers; ½ teaspoon parsley, finely chopped

Why it works: Lettuce and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 372 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Salad, Mayonnaise

Ingredients

Directions

Clean and dry the French lettuces.
Take the small heart of one lettuce, uncut from the stalk, and stand it upright in the middle of the salad.
Arrange the softer parts of the leaves on top to create a smooth surface.
Make a thick Mayonnaise sauce and spread it over the mound and the surface of the salad.
Ornament the edge with hard-boiled egg quarters, placing slices of pickled gherkins and stoned olives between them.
Dry the French capers on a cloth and sprinkle them about an inch apart on the white surface.
Finely chop the parsley and sprinkle it over the salad.

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 + caperstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together372 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,550 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,688 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,483 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Lettuce + olivetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,580 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, sauce, egg, olive, capers):

Tarragonfits better
Parsleythe original
Dillfits less well
Garlicfits less well

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