Name: Stuffed Celery Salad
Ingredients: tender stalks of celery; tartare sauce; lettuce leaves; Roquefort cheese; sherry wine; Neufchatel cheese; chopped nuts

Why it works: Celery and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,033 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Stuffed Celery Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Clean the celery stalks and soak them in cold water for a few minutes.
Dry the celery and fill the crevice with tartare sauce.
Place three or four stuffed stalks on lettuce leaves and serve.
Alternatively, mash Roquefort cheese with a spoon and mix in a little sherry wine to stuff the celery.
You can also fill the celery with creamed Neufchatel cheese mixed with chopped nuts.

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 + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Roquefort cheese + cheesetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together21 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).
Lettuce + nutstop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together174 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).
Roquefort cheese + sherrytop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl pentanoate (yeast, fruit).
Sherry + cheesetop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together143 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl pentanoate (yeast, fruit).

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

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (celery, sauce, lettuce, roquefort cheese, sherry, wine, cheese):

Walnutfits better
Beansfits better
Chestnutfits better
Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, sauce, lettuce, roquefort cheese, sherry, wine, cheese. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.