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Nut Salad Sandwiches

A sandwich filled with a walnut and celery salad topped with mayonnaise and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Nut Salad Sandwiches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Grind the nuts in a meat grinder.

  2. Mix the ground nuts with finely chopped celery.

  3. Add mayonnaise and lemon juice to the nut and celery mixture.

Assemble the sandwiches

  1. Cut the white bread into thin slices.

  2. Brush one side of each slice with melted butter.

  3. Place a lettuce leaf on the buttered side of one slice.

  4. Spread the nut and celery mixture on top of the lettuce.

  5. Top with another slice of bread and 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. Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together491 recipes

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

  2. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Walnut + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together852 recipes

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

  5. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Walnuts or hickory nuts
Provide the main body and crunch of the filling.
Celery
Adds crisp texture and fresh, mild flavour to the filling.
Mayonnaise
Binds the chopped nuts and celery into a creamy, moist filling.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich mayonnaise and nuts.
Melted butter
Coats the bread to add richness and help keep it from soaking up the filling.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Cherryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against walnut, celery, bread, butter, 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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