Name: Cold Sauces, Salads, Etc
Ingredients: 1 tablespoon coarse sea salt; ½ teaspoon black pepper; ⅓ cup oil; 2 tablespoons tarragon vinegar (or common/cucumber vinegar)

Why it works: Pepper and tarragon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,399 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Cold Sauces, Salads, Etc

Ingredients

1 tablespoon coarse sea salt
½ teaspoon black pepper
⅓ cup oil
2 tablespoons tarragon vinegar (or common/cucumber vinegar)

Directions

In a large bowl, combine the oil, salt, and pepper.
Pour the mixture over the salad and toss well.
Add the tarragon vinegar and mix thoroughly.
Serve immediately.

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.

Pepper + tarragontop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,399 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Oil: Carries the flavor and coats the salad leaves, giving a smooth, glossy texture.
Tarragon vinegar: Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and cuts through the richness of the oil.
Coarse sea salt: Seasons the dressing and draws out flavor from the other ingredients.

“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.