Name: Asparagus Salad
Ingredients: 1 lb cold cooked asparagus; 1 cucumber, thinly sliced

Why it works: Asparagus and cucumber match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 203 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Asparagus Salad

Ingredients

1 lb cold cooked asparagus
1 cucumber, thinly sliced

Directions

Prepare

Take tips from the cold cooked asparagus.
Cut the cucumber into thin slices.

Chill

Let the mixture stand in the refrigerator for 1 hour.

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.

Asparagus + cucumbertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together203 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

Asparagus: Forms the main body of the salad and provides its tender, crisp-cooked texture.
Cucumber: Adds cool, crisp texture and fresh moisture to the salad.

“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.