Name: Fruit Salad
Ingredients: 2 oranges; 2 bananas; 12 English walnuts; 1 head lettuce; mayonnaise

Why it works: Walnut and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 491 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Fruit Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Wash the lettuce and set it aside to crisp.
Peel the oranges and cut them into small pieces.
Peel the bananas and slice them thinly.

Assemble and serve

Arrange the lettuce on individual serving plates.
Layer the banana slices on top of the lettuce, followed by the orange pieces.
Dress the salad with mayonnaise.
Garnish with the English walnuts, broken into small pieces or halves.

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.

Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together491 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Orange + bananatop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,118 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Banana + lettucetop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together198 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Orange + lettucetop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together373 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Banana + walnuttop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together508 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Lettuce: Forms the crisp base that holds the fruit and dressing.
Bananas: Add soft texture and natural sweetness to the salad.
Oranges: Add juicy moisture and a bright, slightly acidic flavor.
Mayonnaise: Adds fat and creaminess, coating the fruit and moistening the salad.
English walnuts: Add crunch and a nutty, rich flavor contrast to the soft fruit.