Name: Celery Salad
Ingredients: 3 bunches celery; ½ pint mayonnaise dressing; salt; pepper; celery leaves for garnish

Celery Salad

A chilled salad of sliced celery tossed with mayonnaise dressing, seasoned with salt and pepper, garnished with celery leaves.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription

From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients

Why it works: Celery and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,012 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Celery Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Cut the white stalks of celery into pieces ½ inch long.
For each pint of celery, use ½ pint of mayonnaise dressing.
Dust the celery lightly with salt and pepper.

Assemble and serve

Mix the celery with the dressing.
Heap it on a cold plate, garnish with celery leaves, and serve immediately.

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 + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together16,012 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Celery: Provides the crisp, fibrous texture that gives the salad its body.
Mayonnaise dressing: Adds fat and creaminess that coats the celery and carries the seasoning.

“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.