Name: Chicken Salad
Ingredients: cold boiled or roast chicken, cut into 4-inch cubes; French dressing; celery, cut into small pieces; Cream or Mayonnaise Dressing No. 1 or No. 2; lettuce or celery tips for garnish; capers; yolks of hard-cooked eggs

Why it works: Lettuce and capers match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 372 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Chicken Salad

Ingredients

cold boiled or roast chicken, cut into 4-inch cubes
French dressing
celery, cut into small pieces
Cream or Mayonnaise Dressing No. 1 or No. 2
lettuce or celery tips for garnish
capers
yolks of hard-cooked eggs

Directions

Cut the cold boiled or roast chicken into 4-inch cubes.
Marinate the chicken with French dressing.
Just before serving, add an equal quantity of small pieces of celery.
Mix with Cream or Mayonnaise Dressing No. 1 or No. 2.
Garnish with lettuce or celery tips, capers, and yolks of hard-cooked eggs.

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 their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Lettuce + caperstop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together372 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Celery + caperstop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together405 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Chicken + celerytop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,375 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Chicken + lettucetop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,421 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, cream, lettuce, capers, egg):

Tarragonfits better
Parsleyfits better
Nutmegfits about as well
Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, cream, lettuce, capers, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.