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Salad

Tomato and Onion Salad

A salad of sliced tomatoes and chopped onion dressed with salad dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 20,633 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Tomato and Onion Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the onion

  1. Boil or bake the onion until three-quarters cooked.

  2. Let the onion cool, then chop it coarsely.

Assemble and serve

  1. Sprinkle the chopped onion over the sliced tomatoes.

  2. Add a little salad dressing and serve.

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.

  1. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Supply juicy body and bright acidity that moistens and freshens the salad.
Onion
Adds sharp aroma and flavour, which partial cooking mellows.

The step that matters

Cook the onion only until three-quarters done. Partial cooking softens the onion's harsh raw bite and sulfur-driven sharpness while it still keeps some texture. Cooking it fully makes it soft and mushy, so it loses the crisp contrast the salad needs.

“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.

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