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Christmas Salad

A salad of grapes, walnuts, celery, lettuce, saltines, ribbon, and holly sprigs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 491 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Christmas Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the salad

  1. Remove skins from Malaga grapes, cut in halves lengthwise, and remove seeds.

  2. Add an equal quantity of broken English walnut meats and half as much finely chopped celery.

  3. Moisten with French Dressing.

Assemble and serve

  1. Fill small nests made of lettuce leaves.

  2. Trim saltines on ends to form squares when put together by fours.

  3. Place four saltines on each salad plate and tie in place with narrow red ribbon.

  4. Insert a portion of salad into each box made from the saltines.

  5. Garnish with sprigs of holly, bright with red berries.

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. Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together491 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Walnut + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

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

  4. Grape + walnuttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,427 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  5. Grape + lettucetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together349 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Malaga grapes
Provide sweetness and juicy texture to the salad.
English walnut meats
Add crunch and a rich, slightly bitter flavor.
Celery
Adds crisp texture and a fresh, mild bite.
French dressing
Moistens the salad, adding acidity and flavor.
Lettuce leaves
Form edible nests that hold the salad in place.

Swap the grape

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Grapethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, meat, celery, lettuce. 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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