Silver linden + Chinese broccoli
Tilia tomentosa (Silver Lime in the UK and Silver Linden in the US) is a species of Tilia native to southeastern Europe and southwestern Asia, from Hungary and the Balkans east to western Turkey, occurring at moderate altitudes. It is a deciduous tree growing to 20–35 m tall, with a trunk up to 2 m diameter. The leaves are alternately arranged, rounded to triangular-ovate, 4–13 cm long and broad with a 2.5–4 cm petiole, green and mostly hairless above, densely white tomentose with white hairs below, and with a coarsely toothed margin. The flowers are pale yellow, hermaphrodite, produced in cymes of three to ten in mid to late summer with a pale green subtending leafy bract; they have a strong scent and are pollinated by honeybees. The nectar however contains sugars which cannot be digested by other bees, to whom the tree is somewhat toxic. The fruit is a dry nut-like drupe 8–10 mm long, downy, and slightly ribbed.

Kai-lan (also written as gai-lan) is the Cantonese name for a vegetable that is also known as Chinese broccoli or Chinese kale. It is a leaf vegetable featuring thick, flat, glossy blue-green leaves with thick stems and a small number of tiny flower heads similar to those of broccoli. Broccoli and kai-lan belong to the same species Brassica oleracea, but kai-lan is in the group alboglabra [Latin albus+glabrus white and hairless]. Its flavor is very similar to that of broccoli, but slightly more bitter. It is also noticeably stronger. Broccolini is a hybrid between broccoli and kai-lan, produced by Mann Packing Company, Inc.
Shared flavor compounds
These compounds appear in both Silver linden and Chinese broccoli, giving them a molecular basis for flavor affinity, the pairing principle articulated by Francois Benzi and implemented in flavor-pairing research.
Why it works
The flavor-pairing hypothesis proposes that ingredients sharing significant aromatic compounds harmonize on the palate. Silver linden and Chinese broccoli overlap on 20 key compound(s), which is why classic culinary traditions, and our deterministic matching algorithm, place them together.
- Pairing computed by: pairing-compute
- Methodology: deterministic compound-overlap matching (no LLM)
- Compound data: Wikidata + Wikidata
- Part of: Living Gastronomic Intelligence graph