Name: Cherry Salad
Ingredients: 1 cup fresh sour cherries; 1 tablespoon minced parsley; ¼ teaspoon onion juice; Small head lettuce; French dressing

Why it works: Parsley and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,483 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Cherry Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Stem, wash, and stone the cherries, then refrigerate for 1 hour.
Use only the crisp, inner leaves of the lettuce; wash, drain, and chill them.
Make the French dressing and mix in the parsley and onion juice.
If desired, insert a roasted hazelnut into each cherry before chilling.

Serve

When ready to serve, combine the cherries with the dressing and arrange on the lettuce.

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.

Parsley + lettucetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,483 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Onion + lettucetop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,562 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together25,843 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Sour cherries: Provide the tart fruit that forms the salad's main flavor and body.
Lettuce: Provides a crisp, cool base that holds the dressed cherries.
French dressing: Adds moisture and a sweet-tart, acidic flavor to the salad.