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Salad

Apple Peanut Salad

A salad of chopped apples and celery tossed with a lemon‑peanut butter dressing, served on lettuce and garnished with peanuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Apple Peanut Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare, core, and chop the apples.

  2. Mix the chopped apples with the chopped celery.

Make and season the salad

  1. In a bowl, combine the lemon juice and peanut butter to make the dressing.

  2. Mix the dressing into the apples and celery.

  3. Season with salt and cayenne pepper.

  4. Chill the salad before serving on lettuce and garnish with peanuts.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  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. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Peanut + lettucetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together170 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide the crisp, firm bulk of the salad, with slight acidity that balances the sweetness.
Celery
Adds crunch and a fresh, watery texture to the salad.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and slows browning of the cut apples.
Peanut butter
Adds richness and a nutty flavour, and helps bind the dressing.

The step that matters

Dress the apples soon after cutting. Cut apples brown quickly as their enzymes react with air. Acidic lemon juice in the dressing slows this, so mixing it in promptly keeps the salad pale and fresh.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (celery, lemon, peanut, butter, pepper, lettuce):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against celery, lemon, peanut, butter, pepper, 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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