Name: Yellow Tomato Salad
Ingredients: small yellow 'pear' tomatoes; curly lettuce leaves; parsley; French dressing

Why it works: Lettuce and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and 1,483 recipes mention both. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Yellow Tomato Salad

Ingredients

small yellow 'pear' tomatoes
curly lettuce leaves
parsley
French dressing

Directions

Remove the skins from the small yellow 'pear' tomatoes.
Chill the tomatoes on ice until very cold.
Arrange the chilled tomatoes in a pattern on a bed of crisp curly lettuce leaves.
Sprinkle with parsley and serve with French dressing.

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 + parsleytop 5% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together1,483 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Tomato + lettucetop 6% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together1,655 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Tomato + parsleytop 8% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together5,398 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Pear + lettucetop 9% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together92 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Pear + tomatotop 14% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together88 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the pear

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, lettuce, parsley):

Avocadobetter flavor fit
Limebetter flavor fit
Lemonbetter flavor fit
Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, lettuce, parsley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).