Name: Cauliflower Salad
Ingredients: 1 head of lettuce; cold boiled cauliflower; mayonnaise

Why it works: Lettuce and cauliflower match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 151 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Cauliflower Salad

Ingredients

1 head of lettuce
cold boiled cauliflower
mayonnaise

Directions

Separate the sprigs of cold boiled cauliflower.
Place a head of lettuce in a salad dish and cover it with mayonnaise.
Arrange the cauliflower sprigs around the dish 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.

Lettuce + cauliflowertop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together151 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Lettuce: Provides a crisp, cool base that the mayonnaise coats.
Cauliflower: Adds firm, mild bulk and a tender bite.
Mayonnaise: Adds fat and richness, coating the vegetables with creamy moisture.

“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.