Name: Endive Salad
Ingredients: 2 heads of endive; cress; shredded celery; boiled beetroot; salad dressing

Why it works: Endive and beetroot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 132 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Endive Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Separate the endive into tufts.
Toss the endive tufts in salad dressing.

Serve

Pile the dressed endive high in a salad bowl.
Garnish with cress, shredded celery, and boiled beetroot.

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.

Endive + beetroottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together132 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Endive + celerytop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together160 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Celery + beetroottop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together652 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Endive: Forms the crisp, leafy base of the salad and gives its slightly bitter flavour.
Salad dressing: Coats the leaves, adding moisture and flavour to the crisp endive.