Name: Fruit and Nut Salad
Ingredients: 1 cup diced fresh apples; 1 cup diced celery; 1 small bell pepper, finely chopped; cooked mayonnaise dressing; lemon juice to taste; lettuce leaves; 1 red apple, thinly sliced; ground pecan nuts

Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fruit and Nut Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and dress

In a bowl, mix the diced apples, celery, and finely chopped bell pepper.
Dress the mixture with cooked mayonnaise and add lemon juice to taste.

Serve

Serve the salad on a bed of lettuce leaves on a platter.
Garnish with thin crescent-shaped slices of red apple and sprinkle with ground pecan nuts.
For a decorative touch, serve in orange shells.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,467 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together16,012 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Pepper + lettucetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,037 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Diced apples: Provide crisp texture and fresh, mild sweetness to the salad.
Celery: Adds crunch and a fresh, watery bite to the mixture.
Cooked mayonnaise dressing: Coats the fruit and vegetables, adding richness and moisture.
Ground pecan nuts: Adds a toasty, buttery flavour and a contrasting texture.

Swap the nuts

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

Chickpeafits better
Chestnutfits better
Beansfits better
Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, celery, pepper, lemon, 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.