Name: Veal Salad
Ingredients: 10 cents veal steak; ½ cup celery, chopped; 1 tablespoon sugar; cabbage, finely chopped (amount based on meat); 10 English walnuts, chopped; white grapes (optional, if no cabbage is used); mayonnaise; lettuce leaves for serving

Why it works: Walnut and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 491 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Veal Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Boil the veal until tender, then shred it into small pieces.
In a bowl, combine the veal, sugar, salt, pepper, and celery or celery seed.
Finely chop the cabbage and add it to the mixture based on the amount of meat used.
If not using cabbage, substitute with white grapes.
Finally, add the chopped walnuts and mix with mayonnaise.
Serve the salad on lettuce leaves.

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.

Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together491 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Cabbage + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together622 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Celery + walnuttop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together852 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Celery + cabbagetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,840 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

Swap the cabbage

The recipe marks cabbage as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (veal, celery, sugar, meat, walnut, grape, lettuce):

Mustardfits better
Beetrootfits better
Carrotfits better
Cabbagethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against veal, celery, sugar, meat, walnut, grape, lettuce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.