Name: Tomato Salad
Ingredients: small tomatoes; lettuce leaves; 1 tablespoon mayonnaise dressing

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

Tomato Salad

Ingredients

small tomatoes
lettuce leaves
1 tablespoon mayonnaise dressing

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

Peel the small tomatoes and remove the hard parts at the stem.
Cut each tomato nearly through into eighths.

Assemble

Place the cut tomatoes on a lettuce leaf and press them open.
Drop 1 tablespoon of mayonnaise dressing into the center.
Alternatively, slice larger tomatoes and place the dressing on the slices.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Tomato + lettucetop 6% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned 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

Small tomatoes: Provide the main body and juicy flesh of the salad.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds fat and creaminess that softens the tomato's acidity.

“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.