Name: Orange Salad
Ingredients: Oranges; Lettuce leaves; Mayonnaise; Brown or white bread; Cream cheese; Chopped walnuts

Why it works: Lettuce and walnut 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 ↓

Orange Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Remove the skins from the oranges and separate the fruit into sections, breaking each section once.
Place the orange sections on lettuce leaves and top with mayonnaise.
Serve with brown or white bread spread with a mixture of cream cheese and chopped walnuts.

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 + walnuttop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together491 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Cream cheese + walnuttop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together439 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Orange + lettucetop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together373 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,058 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).
Lettuce + breadtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together602 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lettuce, bread, cream cheese, walnut):

Avocadofits better
Figfits better
Coconutfits better
Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lettuce, bread, cream cheese, walnut. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.