Name: Spanish Salad
Ingredients: cold dressed French beans or scarlet runner beans; good mayonnaise; 3 tomatoes

Why it works: Beans and tomato match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,713 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Spanish Salad

Ingredients

cold dressed French beans or scarlet runner beans
good mayonnaise
3 tomatoes

Directions

Place cold dressed French beans or scarlet runner beans in the center of a bowl.
Pour good mayonnaise over the beans just before serving.
Garnish the beans with 3 tomatoes, sliced and arranged in a circle, overlapping each other.

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.

Beans + tomatotop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,713 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

French beans or scarlet runner beans: Form the bulk of the salad and provide its main texture.
Good mayonnaise: Adds richness and moisture, coating the beans with creamy fat.
Tomatoes: Add acidity and freshness, with juice that brightens the rich dressing.

“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.