Name: Summer Salad
Ingredients: Tender lettuces; Mustard; Cress; Young radishes; Chives or small green onions (optional); Half-grown cucumbers

Why it works: Lettuce and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,356 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Summer Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Wash and carefully clear the herbs and vegetables.
Cut off the stems of the lettuces and strip away the outer leaves.
Slice the cucumbers thinly.

Assemble and serve

Mix the lettuces, mustard, cress, radishes, and cucumbers in a bowl.
Dress the salad just before serving.

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.

Lettuce + mustardtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,356 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Lettuce + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,409 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Radish + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together212 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Lettuce + chivetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together261 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Mustard + radishtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together297 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Tender lettuces: Provide the crisp, tender leafy base of the salad.
Cucumbers: Add cool, moist crunch that lightens the salad.
Radishes: Add a peppery bite and crisp texture.

Swap the chive

The recipe marks chive as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, mustard, radish, cucumber):

Horseradishfits better
Beetrootfits better
Broccolifits about as well
Chivethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, mustard, radish, cucumber. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.