Name: Green Bean and Pimento Salad
Ingredients: 1 can green stringless beans; 1 walnut-sized onion; 3 canned pimentos; 2 teaspoons chives; mayonnaise or cooked salad dressing; lettuce leaves

Why it works: Chive and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 261 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Green Bean and Pimento Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

Drain the green beans and cut them into 1‑inch lengths.
Cut the pimentos into pieces half the size of the beans.
Chop the onion and chives finely.

Dress and serve

Mix the beans, pimentos, onion, chives, and dressing together.
Serve the salad on lettuce leaves.

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.

Chive + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together261 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Beans + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together500 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).
Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together491 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Beans + chivetop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together180 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).
Onion + chivetop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,907 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Green beans: Make up the bulk of the salad and provide its crisp-tender texture.
Pimentos: Add mild sweetness and bright red colour.
Onion: Adds sharp, pungent aroma and bite.
Chives: Add a mild onion flavour and fresh aroma.
Mayonnaise or cooked salad dressing: Adds fat and creaminess, moistening the vegetables and coating them with flavour.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beans, walnut, chive, lettuce):

Beetrootfits better
Welsh onionfits better
Shallotfits better
Onionthe original

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

“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.

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Green Bean and Pimento Salad