Why it works: Watercress and radish share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓
Watercress and Radishes
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Cut the stalks off the watercress and lay it in a dish.
Wash the radishes, remove the tops, and scrape the roots slightly.
Slit each radish twice across to resemble an open flower.
Assemble and serve
Make a bed of watercress in a dish, lay the cut radishes on top, and place a small salt-cellar in the middle.
Serve immediately.
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.
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Watercress + radishtop 1% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together14 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
- Watercress
- Provides a crisp, peppery leafy base for the salad.
- Radishes
- Add crunch and a sharp, peppery bite to the salad.
“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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