Name: Vegetable Salad
Ingredients: 6 new beets; 2 potatoes; 6 hard-boiled eggs; 3 cucumbers; 1 tablespoon grated onion; cheese (for mixing with egg yolks); watercress; pearl onions (for garnish)

Why it works: Cucumber and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 140 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Vegetable Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the beets and potatoes until tender.
Boil the eggs until hard, then let them rest in beet juice overnight.
Chop the beets and potatoes into dice.
Chop the cucumbers and mix them with the beets, potatoes, and grated onion.
Crumble the yolks of the eggs and mix with cheese.
Combine the vegetables with a cooked dressing and serve on a bed of watercress.
Top each serving with a slice of egg white and some of the egg and cheese mixture.
Garnish with a few pearl onions.

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.

Cucumber + watercresstop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together140 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Potato + oniontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together9,023 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Potato + watercresstop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together170 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Cucumber + oniontop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,050 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Potato + cucumbertop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together481 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

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (potato, egg, cucumber, cheese, watercress):

Chivefits better
Lettucefits better
Horseradishfits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, egg, cucumber, cheese, watercress. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.