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Salad

Orange Salad

A chilled salad of diced oranges, pecan nuts, English walnuts, lemon juice, French dressing, served on endive.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the pecan nuts and English walnuts with the diced oranges.

  2. Squeeze lemon juice over the mixture and let it stand for 30 minutes.

  3. Serve very cold with endive and 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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Walnut + endivetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together39 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Lemon + endivetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together108 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Nuts + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together284 recipes

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

  5. Walnut + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 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

Oranges
Add juicy sweetness and a bright citrus aroma to the salad.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness of the oranges.
Pecan nuts
Add crunch and a rich, buttery flavour that contrasts with the juicy fruit.
English walnuts
Add crunch and a slightly bitter, earthy flavour that contrasts with the fruit.

The step that matters

Let the mixture stand for 30 minutes. Standing lets the lemon juice and orange juice mingle with the nuts and softens their crisp texture slightly, so the flavours blend. Nuts left too long can lose their crunch, so timing matters.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (walnut, orange, lemon, endive):

  1. Pistachiofits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Hazelnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, orange, lemon, endive. 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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