Name: A Winter Salad
Ingredients: 1 or 2 heads of endive; heads of celery; mustard greens; cresses; shredded red cabbage; slices of boiled beetroot; onion (optional); salad sauce

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 ↓

A Winter Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Wash the endive, celery, mustard greens, and cresses thoroughly.
Cut all the greens into small pieces.
Add shredded red cabbage, boiled beetroot slices, and onion if desired.
Mix everything together with salad sauce.
In spring, add radishes and garnish the dish with them.

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 + mustardtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together121 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Celery + mustardtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,169 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Mustard + beetroottop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together484 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Mustard + cabbagetop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,645 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

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (endive, celery, mustard, cabbage, beetroot, sauce):

Lettucefits better
Horseradishfits better
Turnipfits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against endive, celery, mustard, cabbage, beetroot, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.