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Salad

Apple, Nut and Celery Salad

A salad of cubed apple, celery, nuts, optional chestnuts, dressed with French dressing and served on lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Chestnut and lettuce share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 64 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Apple, Nut and Celery Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, combine the apple and celery cubes.

  2. Add the shredded walnuts or pecans.

  3. If using, add the boiled and sliced chestnuts.

  4. Season the mixture with French dressing.

Serve

  1. Serve on a bed of lettuce leaves.

  2. Keep in a cool place until ready to serve.

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. Chestnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together64 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

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

  5. Walnut + chestnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together60 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Apple
Adds crisp texture and a fresh, mildly sweet flavour.
Celery
Adds crunch and a fresh, slightly savoury bite.
Walnuts or pecans
Add richness, fat and a crunchy texture to the salad.

Swap the chestnut

The recipe marks chestnut as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, celery, walnut, lettuce):

  1. Chestnutthe original
  2. Cashew nutfits about as well
  3. Lentilsfits about as well
  4. Chickpeafits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, celery, walnut, 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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