Name: Cheese Salad
Ingredients: 1 head of lettuce; 1 cup grated cheese; French dressing

Why it works: Lettuce and cheese work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 614 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Cheese Salad

Ingredients

1 head of lettuce
1 cup grated cheese
French dressing

Directions

Shred the lettuce.
Mix the shredded lettuce with the grated cheese.
Serve with French dressing.

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.

Lettuce + cheesetop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together614 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

Lettuce: Forms the crisp, leafy base of the salad and provides its fresh texture.
Grated cheese: Adds savoury flavour and a rich, salty note to the lettuce.

“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.