Name: Prawn Salad
Ingredients: 1 pint prawns; 6 tomatoes; ½ cup mayonnaise or salad dressing; lettuce leaves for garnish

Why it works: Tomato and lettuce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,655 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Prawn Salad

Ingredients

1 pint prawns
6 tomatoes
½ cup mayonnaise or salad dressing
lettuce leaves for garnish

Directions

Prepare

Pick the prawns, leaving the skin on a few for garnish.
Peel and slice the tomatoes, then arrange them on a dish.

Assemble and serve

Top the tomatoes with the prawns and pour over the mayonnaise or salad dressing.
Garnish with the reserved prawns and broken lettuce leaves.

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.

Tomato + lettucetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,655 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

Prawns: Provide the main protein and the savoury centre of the salad.
Tomatoes: Add juicy moisture and a fresh, slightly acidic flavour to the base.
Mayonnaise or salad dressing: Adds richness and fat, coating the prawns and tomatoes with flavour.

“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.