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Salad

Christmas Salad

A fresh salad of grapes, oranges, lettuce, and pimento, dressed with olive oil, vinegar, lemon juice, salt, sugar, and paprika.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Christmas Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Remove Malaga grapes from stems, wipe each grape, and take out seeds.

  2. Make a cut in each grape from the stem end to the other end, then insert a narrow strip of canned pimento into each cut grape.

  3. Pare the oranges, removing the white portion, and separate into sections.

Assemble and dress

  1. Arrange crisp lettuce leaves on a shallow salad dish in the form of nests.

  2. Fill each nest with grapes and arrange orange sections between the nests.

  3. For the dressing, mix salt, powdered sugar, paprika, olive oil, vinegar, and lemon juice until well blended.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lettuce + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

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

  3. Grape + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,771 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Olive + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,922 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Orange + olivetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Olive oil
Provides fat and a smooth body to the dressing, carrying flavour across the salad.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the dressing and balances the sweetness of the fruit.
Lemon juice
Adds bright acidity to the dressing, sharpening the flavour of the grapes and oranges.
Powdered sugar
Adds a little sweetness that rounds out the acidity of the vinegar and lemon juice.

Swap the grape

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, lettuce, sugar, olive, vinegar, lemon. 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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