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Salad

Walxut Salad

A salad of walnuts, pickled oysters or clams, watercress, chives, and French dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lettuce and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 307 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Walxut Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the walnuts

  1. Remove the meat from the walnuts as whole as possible.

  2. In a saucepan, cover the walnuts with stock, add the onion slice and bay leaf, and simmer for 20 minutes.

  3. Remove the walnuts from the saucepan and let them cool.

Assemble and serve

  1. Line a salad bowl with heart leaves of lettuce.

  2. Sprinkle the minced watercress and chives over the lettuce.

  3. Add the pickled oysters or clams on top.

  4. Place the cooled walnuts on top of the salad.

  5. Cover with French dressing and add chili to taste before serving.

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. Lettuce + watercresstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together307 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Watercress + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together97 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Lettuce + chivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together261 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  5. Onion + chivetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,907 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Walnuts
Provide the main nutty texture and flavour, and are gently simmered to soften them.
Pickled oysters or clams
Add a briny, tangy contrast that balances the rich walnuts.
French dressing
Adds acidity and oil that moisten the salad and carry its flavour.
Watercress
Adds a peppery, fresh bite to the salad.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (walnut, lettuce, watercress, chive, oyster):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, lettuce, watercress, chive, oyster. 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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