Name: Walnut Salad
Ingredients: 1 cup walnut meats, chopped or ground; sweet whipped cream; salt to taste; sugar to taste; lemon juice to taste; halves of walnuts for decoration

Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Walnut Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Chop or grind the walnut meats.

Make the salad

Bind the nuts together with sweet whipped cream until stiff.
Add salt, sugar, and lemon juice gradually until the mixture tastes just right.
Pile the mixture smoothly on a dish.
Decorate with walnut halves on top.

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.

Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).
Walnut + lemontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,149 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together53,532 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Walnut + creamtop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,982 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together7,147 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Walnut meats: Provide the main body and nutty flavor of the salad.
Sweet whipped cream: Binds the chopped nuts together and gives a soft, creamy texture.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and richness of the cream.