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Pea Salad

A salad of peas, hard‑boiled eggs, celery, walnuts, dressed with mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Celery and walnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 852 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Pea Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the peas, chopped eggs, chopped celery, and walnuts in a bowl.

  2. Add enough mayonnaise dressing to cover the mixture nicely.

  3. Serve immediately.

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. Celery + walnuttop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

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

  2. Peas + celerytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Peas + walnuttop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together170 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  4. Peas + eggtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,065 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Egg + walnuttop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Chopped hard-boiled eggs add body and a soft, creamy richness to the salad.
Celery
Chopped celery adds crisp crunch that contrasts with the soft peas and eggs.
English walnuts
Chopped walnuts add crunch and a mild, nutty flavor.
Mayonnaise dressing
Mayonnaise coats the ingredients, adding moisture, richness and tang.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, celery, walnut):

  1. Pistachiofits better
  2. Cashew nutfits better
  3. Lentilsfits better
  4. Peasthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, celery, walnut. 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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