Name: Salads and Salad Sauces
Ingredients: fresh vegetables (dandelion, corn-salad, chicory, mint, sorrel, fennel, marshmallows, tarragon, chives, mustard, cresses); good oil; vinegar; condiments

Why it works: Dandelion and sorrel share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Salads and Salad Sauces

Ingredients

fresh vegetables (dandelion, corn-salad, chicory, mint, sorrel, fennel, marshmallows, tarragon, chives, mustard, cresses)
good oil
vinegar
condiments

Directions

Freshen the vegetables in cool water and clean them of all foreign matter.
Drain the vegetables on a clean napkin.
Tear the vegetables into pieces with your fingers instead of cutting them with a knife.
Combine the vegetables delicately with good oil, vinegar, and condiments.
Serve immediately for the best flavor.

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.

Dandelion + sorreltop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together134 recipes

Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).
Sorrel + chivetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together64 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

Swap the mint

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (dandelion, corn, chicory, sorrel, fennel, tarragon, chive):

Capersfits better
Parsleyfits better
Thymefits better
Mintthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against dandelion, corn, chicory, sorrel, fennel, tarragon, chive. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.