Why it works: Turnip and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 526 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓
Macedoine Salad
Ingredients
Directions
Boil young carrots, new beets, new potatoes, and young turnips in separate salted waters until tender.
Use twice as much beet as any other vegetable, then drain and let cool.
Cut the vegetables into dice, cubes, strips, slices, triangles, or balls.
Arrange the cut vegetables on lettuce leaves.
Sprinkle with chopped pickle and garnish with hard-boiled eggs.
Serve with your preferred dressing.
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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Turnip + lettucetop 1% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together526 recipes
Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
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Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together8,002 recipes
Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
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Carrot + potatotop 4% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together3,107 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
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Carrot + lettucetop 6% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together976 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
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Potato + lettucetop 7% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together322 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
Swap the potato
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (carrot, turnip, lettuce, egg):
- Leekfits better
- Beetrootfits better
- Parsnipfits better
- Potatothe original
Fit is the average pairing score against carrot, turnip, lettuce, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.
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