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Salad

Green Pea and String Bean Salad

A cold salad of boiled string beans and peas mixed with mayonnaise and served on lettuce leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beans and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 500 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Green Pea and String Bean Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the salad

  1. Mix together the cold boiled string beans and cold boiled peas.

  2. Season to taste and stir in the mayonnaise dressing.

Serve

  1. Arrange lettuce leaves on a dish.

  2. Place a large spoonful of the vegetable mixture on each leaf.

  3. Top each mound with a spoonful of mayonnaise.

  4. Serve very cold.

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. Beans + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together500 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Beans + peastop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together949 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  3. Peas + lettucetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,293 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

String beans
Provide the main bulk and a firm, crisp texture to the salad.
Peas
Add sweetness and a tender texture alongside the string beans.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds fat and richness, moistening the vegetables and binding the salad together.

Swap the peas

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

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Lentilsfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beans, lettuce. 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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