Name: A Salad
Ingredients: succulent green herbs or vegetables (lettuce, watercress, mustard and cress, endive, young spinach tops, cucumber, tomatoes); coarse sea salt; cold vegetables (beetroot, potatoes, French or kidney beans, cauliflowers)

Why it works: Lettuce and beetroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 678 recipes mention both. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

succulent green herbs or vegetables (lettuce, watercress, mustard and cress, endive, young spinach tops, cucumber, tomatoes)
coarse sea salt
cold vegetables (beetroot, potatoes, French or kidney beans, cauliflowers)

Directions

Pull apart the green herbs or vegetables and soak them in cold water with coarse sea salt for about an hour.
Lift the herbs out into fresh water and dry them carefully to avoid bruising the leaves.
Avoid chopping the salad to maintain its flavor.
Add any cold vegetables, especially leftovers from a previous meal.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Lettuce + beetroottop 1% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together678 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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