Name: Pea and Salmon Salad
Ingredients: 1 can salmon; 1 can peas; boiled salad dressing or mayonnaise to moisten

Why it works: Salmon and peas work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 375 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Pea and Salmon Salad

Ingredients

1 can salmon
1 can peas
boiled salad dressing or mayonnaise to moisten

Directions

Prepare

Drain the peas from the liquid.
Remove all bones and skin from the salmon.
Mince the salmon and add it to the peas.

Assemble and serve

Toss together with enough salad dressing to moisten well.
Serve very cold.

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.

Salmon + peastop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together375 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Salmon: Provides the main protein and flesh that forms the body of the salad.
Peas: Add sweetness, soft texture and bulk to the salad.
Boiled salad dressing or mayonnaise: Adds fat and moisture so the mixture holds together and stays moist.

“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.