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Peanut Salad

A salad of soaked peanuts, celery, olives, and mayonnaise dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Peanut and olive match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,027 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Peanut Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the peanut meats in olive oil for 1½ hours.

Assemble and serve

  1. Drain the peanuts and toss them in a salad bowl with the celery and olives.

  2. Mix with mayonnaise 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. Peanut + olivetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,027 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Olive + celerytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,667 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Peanut + celerytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together148 recipes

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

  4. Peanut + meattop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together119 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Meat + olivetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,485 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Peanut meats
Provide the main crunchy, nutty body of the salad.
Olive oil
Soaking carries fat into the peanuts, softening them and adding richness.
Celery
Adds crisp texture and fresh moisture to contrast the peanuts.
Olives
Add briny, savoury flavour that cuts through the richness.
Mayonnaise dressing
Binds the ingredients and adds creamy fat and tang.

Swap the celery

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peanut, meat, olive):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Corianderfits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Celerythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peanut, meat, olive. 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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