Name: French Salad
Ingredients: endive; tarragon (or other herbs); English salad sauce

Why it works: Endive and tarragon share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 75 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

French Salad

Ingredients

endive
tarragon (or other herbs)
English salad sauce

Directions

Blanch the endive and wash it clean.
Break the endive into small branches with your fingers.
Shake the endive dry in a basket or fine cloth.
Arrange the endive in a salad bowl and sprinkle with minced tarragon or other herbs.
Add the dressing just before serving.

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.

Endive + tarragontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together75 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Tarragon + saucetop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together566 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Endive + saucetop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together129 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).