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Salad

Grape Fruit Salad

A salad of grapefruit, celery, lettuce, and French dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Grapefruit and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Grape Fruit Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Peel the grapefruit and break it into pieces.

  2. Add an equal amount of celery cut into small pieces.

  3. Serve the mixture on lettuce leaves and drizzle with French dressing.

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. Grapefruit + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together118 recipes

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

  2. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Grapefruit + celerytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together58 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-vinylphenol (clove, smoky).

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

What each ingredient does

Grapefruit
Provides the main fresh, tart citrus flavor and juicy texture.
Celery
Adds a crisp, crunchy texture that contrasts with the soft fruit.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (grapefruit, lettuce):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Celerythe original
  4. Corianderfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against grapefruit, 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.

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