Name: Melon Salad
Ingredients: 1 melon; mayonnaise dressing; lettuce leaves

Why it works: Melon and lettuce work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 23 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Melon Salad

Ingredients

1 melon
mayonnaise dressing
lettuce leaves

Directions

Prepare the melon

Chill the melon on ice until ready to use.
Remove the seeds and rind from the melon.
Cut the pulp into small dice.

Dress and serve

Cover the diced melon with mayonnaise dressing.
Serve on lettuce leaves.

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.

Melon + lettucetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together23 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Melon: Provides the main body of the salad, with juicy texture and natural sweetness.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds fat and creaminess, coating the diced melon and giving it a rich mouthfeel.

“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.