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Salad

Cherry Salad

A salad of cherries filled with nuts and celery, served on lettuce with a sweet syrup dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,467 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Cherry Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cherries

  1. Remove the stones from the cherries, saving all the juice.

  2. Fill the cavities of the cherries with chopped mixed nuts and celery.

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the reserved cherry juice, lemon juice, and sugar until it forms a syrup.

  2. Strain the syrup.

Serve

  1. Chill the filled cherries and serve on crisp lettuce leaves.

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 + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Mixed nuts + lettucetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Lettuce + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,559 recipes

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

  5. Mixed nuts + celerytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15 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

Cherries
Provide the main fruit body and the juice that becomes the syrup.
Chopped mixed nuts
Add crunch and a toasty, nutty flavor inside the cherries.
Chopped celery
Adds crisp, fresh texture to the filling.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet cherry syrup.

Swap the mixed nuts

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

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Lentilsfits better
  4. Mixed nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, lettuce, lemon, sugar. 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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