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Salad

Tomato and Cucumber Salad

A fresh salad of lettuce, cucumber, tomato, radishes, and French dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and cucumber match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,409 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Tomato and Cucumber Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Assemble

  1. Lay a nice crisp bed of lettuce in a dish.

  2. Place slices of cucumber on top of the lettuce.

  3. Add slices of tomato on top of the cucumbers.

Garnish and serve

  1. Garnish the salad with radishes cut like roses.

  2. Serve with French dressing.

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.

  1. Lettuce + cucumbertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,409 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Cucumber + radishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together212 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Lettuce + radishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together58 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Cucumber + tomatotop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Lettuce + tomatotop 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

Lettuce
Forms a crisp base that holds the other vegetables and dressing.
Cucumber
Adds cool, moist crunch that contrasts with the tomato.
Tomatoes
Add juiciness and a gentle acidity to the salad.
French dressing
Adds fat and acidity that season and coat the vegetables.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, cucumber, radish, rose):

  1. Beetrootfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Broccolifits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, cucumber, radish, rose. 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.

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