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Salad

Moulded Celery and Walnut Salad

A salad of celery and walnuts mixed with mayonnaise and seasoned with onion, clove, peppercorns, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 852 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Moulded Celery and Walnut Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Use half the quantity of walnuts as celery.

  2. Clean and cut the celery into ½-inch pieces.

  3. Cook the walnuts in boiling salted water with the onion, clove, and peppercorns for 10 minutes.

  4. Cut the walnuts into small pieces.

Assemble and shape

  1. Mix the celery and walnuts with just enough mayonnaise to hold them together.

  2. Mould the mixture as you would for chicken salad, using chicken, tomato, or wine jelly.

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.

  1. Celery + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Celery + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  3. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Walnut + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Onion + clovetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,901 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Celery
Provides crisp texture and fresh, watery crunch that contrasts with the soft dressing.
Walnuts
Add firm crunch and a rich, slightly bitter nutty flavour.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and richness, and binds the pieces together into a cohesive salad.

The step that matters

Mix in just enough mayonnaise. Too little mayonnaise will not bind the celery and walnuts, while too much makes the salad greasy and loose, so it will not hold a moulded shape.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (celery, walnut, clove):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, walnut, clove. 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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