Name: Corn Salad
Ingredients: sugar; vinegar; lemon juice; hard-boiled eggs; mustard; sweet oil; coarse sea salt; pepper

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Corn Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Dress the corn salad at the table with sugar and vinegar or lemon juice.
Alternatively, mix hard-boiled eggs, vinegar, mustard, sweet oil, coarse sea salt, and pepper for a French-style dressing.
You can also dress scurvy grass and lettuce in the same manner.

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.

Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together14,067 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together15,430 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Lemon + mustardtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,816 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,814 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, vinegar, lemon, egg, pepper):

Capsicumfits better
Mustardthe original
Cucumberfits about as well
Shallotfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, lemon, egg, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.