Name: Mayonnaise of Chicken, Nuts and Celery
Ingredients: 1 cup cooked chestnuts, cut into small pieces; mayonnaise dressing; heart leaves of lettuce; whipped cream (optional)

Why it works: Chestnut and lettuce share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 64 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Mayonnaise of Chicken, Nuts and Celery

Ingredients

1 cup cooked chestnuts, cut into small pieces
mayonnaise dressing
heart leaves of lettuce
whipped cream (optional)

Directions

Combine the cooked chestnuts with enough mayonnaise dressing to hold the mixture together.
Shape the mixture into a mound on a serving dish surrounded by heart leaves of lettuce.
Mask the mound with mayonnaise.
Using a pastry bag and tube, pipe a design on the mound.
Finish with a tuft of lettuce on top.
Set aside in a cool place for about 10 minutes before serving.

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.

Chestnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together64 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Chestnut + creamtop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together643 recipes

Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).
Lettuce + creamtop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,121 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).