Name: Apple and Celery Salad
Ingredients: 1 cup crisp celery, cut into lengths; 1 cup tart apples, chopped; coarse sea salt, to taste; French Dressing or Mayonnaise, for serving

Why it works: Celery and apple are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,155 recipes. Both carry 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol, which smells clove, smoky. The science ↓

Apple and Celery Salad

Ingredients

1 cup crisp celery, cut into lengths
1 cup tart apples, chopped
coarse sea salt, to taste
French Dressing or Mayonnaise, for serving

Directions

Chill the celery and apples thoroughly.
In a bowl, combine the chilled celery and chopped apples.
Sprinkle lightly with coarse sea salt and toss gently.
Serve with French Dressing or Mayonnaise.

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.

Celery + appletop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,155 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

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

What each ingredient does

Celery: Provides the crisp, crunchy texture that gives the salad its body.
Tart apples: Adds crisp juiciness and a bright acidic note that balances the dressing.

“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.